For Marxism, strategy is not self-executing. Alone it is a theory or plan of what should be done, of what class and social forces can be brought together for what next strategic goal, aim, or objective. What determines whether that happens or not is tactics. Of course, further objective developments also play an important role. So what is the realm of tactics and its relationship to strategy? What are the means through which the strategic alignment we seek is brought about? That alignment today is of the working class and labor movement as a whole and in the leading position, the nationally and racially oppressed as a whole, starting with the African American and Mexican American people, immigrants – documented and undocumented, women and youth as the core fores of an all-peoples front. That front potentially can include all other working people and the non-ultra-right section of monopoly interests (not in the leading position, of course). It can include the movements on social issues and left, progressive and center political tendencies in the country in a loose all-peoples front against the Bush administration, its Congressional base, the ultra-right section of the transnational monopolies and the organizations, movements and political tendencies that are allied with them.
This strategic alignment is accomplished by selecting the best tactics possible. That means emphasizing the right issues and demands on those issues, the most useful forms of struggle and organization to accomplish that. There will have to be more than one issue and one demand nationally to accomplish this alignment and a number of forms of organization and struggle, differing to some degree all across the country according to circumstances.
Thus tactics must serve and fit strategy and bring them from concept to reality because of their fitting the situation, their usefulness. The standard of judging tactics is essentially how successful they are in bringing strategy to life – to reducing opponents to a minimum – to maximizing the democratic forces and their best alignment. Sometimes tactics are highly successful in accomplishing this with the least difficulty and cost.
Sometimes they are reasonably successful but other times not very successful or not successful at all and are very costly in terms of relationships with various forces for the future or costly in other terms. When tactics are not accomplishing the strategic objectives sought they need adjustment or even substitution: something else, must be tried. Strategy without appropriate, fitting tactics is sterile, unproductive and a dead letter. On the other hand, tactics without strategy is directionless. It results in loss of course. It is form without content that it fits. The great variety of issues, demands, forms of organization, forms of struggle, of techniques are of great importance when they further content, further strategy.
Principles of Tactics
There are principles of tactics which help us choose the most appropriate ones. Among these are the following: they are taken from Lenin’s writings and our own experience.
Lenin says for millions to develop their consciousness of reality it is necessary for them to have their own experience in the social struggle for progress. For this to happen the main level of activity has to be the level on which masses are currently prepared to struggle, to act. That is the mass action or organization level, the level of issues, demands, forms of struggle and organization that the broadest masses are currently ready to move on. Propaganda and agitation are also necessary but alone will never bring about major change. Propaganda is for socialism or for the full solution of the social problem being addressed. It is necessary so the number on the left who consider these solutions desirable and necessary grows and the number joining the Communist Party and YCL will grow. These forces will then be available to help move the millions on the action level. There also is a need for agitation which prepares the masses currently in motion to move on to more advanced struggle. To engage in propaganda or agitation primarily or exclusively is a sectarian error that isolates from the masses, cannot long attract, and lectures from the sidelines. Such an approach loses the confidence of the masses and leads to questioning whether you are for real and what is your real agenda.
People who approach everything very abstractly and intellectually often over emphasize propaganda and agitation. Treating the action level as primary, a failure to engage in propaganda and agitation will lead to liquidating the most advanced forces, including the Party and a loss of course for the mass movement so that it is unable to develop from one point and stage to another.
Ebb and Flow
Another principle is to take into account whether the general period of mass activity is one of ebb or flow. Issues, demands, forms of struggle and organization change in appropriateness and success according to that reality and our correct assessment of it.
All movements in the country as a whole or on a particular issue like peace, or in a particular area of the country have both periods of flow and ebb. It is important to understand that both are inevitable and cannot be eliminated by force of desire or effort. They become objective factors. They are expressions of the law of uneven development.
When in a period of ebb, tactics will be more in terms of teach-ins, town meetings, and vigils rather than mass demonstrations. They are aimed at preparing the thinking of masses to go over to a period of flow.
We remember here Lenin’s point that it will not be possible to reach a point where a majority of the people are ready to be continually in struggle for social aims over a long period of time until we are in a period close to communist society. The ebb and flow concept emphasizes a crucial point about tactics. They must be highly flexible.
Knowing how to retreat is a necessary part of tactics. Some deny retreat is ever necessary. This proposition is voluntaryism. If we will it, retreating will never be necessary. Retreat is closely related to ebb and flow as to why it takes place. It is also closely related to making a sober estimate of the actually existing relation of forces. Sometimes the existing relation of forces is highly unfavorable, and not because of mistakes of the people’s forces. We often do not control major circumstances and so are confronted with a choice of trying to advance when defeat is highly likely due to a clearly unfavorable balance of forces, or to retreat. Then it is necessary to know how to retreat (not only in the military arena) in good order, preserving the main democratic and progressive forces for the next period when advance becomes possible, in part because of how the retreat was handled. Refusal to recognize the necessity to retreat and acting as if advance and a period of flow still exists can lead to bigger losses and dispersal of democratic and progressive forces. Recognition of the necessity at times to retreat leads to conducting it in terms of issues, demands, forms of struggle and organization that prepare the subjective side of things, the forces for progress, to be able to go over to advance when a new period of flow begins to emerge. It helps prevent demoralization, extreme discouragement, defeatism, paralysis and dispersement when periods of retreat become necessary and, thereby helps move to a new period of advance.
Fetishism of Tactics
A related concept is the opposition of Marxism to fetishism of tactics. This approach treats tactics as though they were strategy. Making a matter of tactics into strategy has been tried many times over the years in many countries and caused much harm.
There are many examples of this: We had the IWW which called for one big union and for a general strike regardless of time, place and circumstance. Today there are leftist groups that always want to move from first actions to a nationwide general strike. There were the syndicalists and anarchists who wanted to put various things in the place of the state, the utopian communities, etc. Staughton Lynd and others once favored the establishment of bases in the country-side and then surrounding the cities, as a panacea to go from here to social revolution. This was a mechanical copying of the forms of the Chinese Revolution. There are several groups now on the ultra-left who make a fetish out of a particular form of struggle, armed struggle or non-conventional military struggle. Anything less in their view, than this cannot achieve major social change anywhere in the world.
Another example is the idea that whenever armed struggle appears, where it has some semblance of representing or involving the have-nots against imperialism, it is to be supported. This subject requires a separate extended discussion which we can only begin here. Armed struggle is a form of struggle. It is tactical and must fit the needs of achieving the necessary strategic alignment of forces.
But if it is treated as strategy, this means a loss of direction and an inability for it to serve the needed strategy. Using it as strategy prevents flexible change of tactics according to whether in practice it helps achieve the alignment of forces required for the strategic objective. The Leninist concept of just and unjust wars must now also take into account the development of weapons of mass destruction like atomic warfare. Atomic or other mass annihilation of people, including targeting civilians, is a negation of achieving the desired alignment of forces, of strategy. Just ends also require just means. Military action targeting civilians is no longer accepted as just means.
Lenin’s concept that exercising the right of self-determination justified whatever means that a people chose to achieve such freedom was not to be exercised and justified on the basis of individual or group decision but by a whole people through their chosen representatives. But even then the points about atomic weapons and civilian targets still apply. Even then when an oppressed people has a right to chose armed struggle, there is still the question of whether it is a good idea given all the circumstances, to choose those methods to achieve the strategic goal and alignment. Those who have made a fetish of the tactics of armed struggle try to impose that on other peoples as the only means to achieve revolutionary change. It is a matter for the given people as a whole to choose their own forms of struggle. Others can express an opinion on the likely outcome and other possibilities but it is not for them to decide. The opinion of the Communist Party of the oppressed people should carry a lot of weight.
In a period in which US imperialism can intervene militarily directly or through surrogates and cause a long stalemate or worse, also has to be taken into account in choosing forms of struggle. In the 1890’s Engels warned about the impact of the advance of weaponry on such choices. In an as inhospitable period as the eve of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, as late as September 1917 still thought it was possible to achieve power through peaceful means of compulsion, without civil war, and sought that path. The compulsion necessary in the transfer of power in the change of social systems and elsewhere is not necessarily identical with military action and civil war. More needs to be said on this subject.
Anything but electoral forms of struggle is likewise a treatment of forms of struggle – tactics – as though they were strategy and without flexibility. Some groups can be counted on to propose a big mass demonstration in Washington, DC in October of election years to prevent “illusions” from participating in electoral politics.
Others make a fetish of crashing a downtown area or particular buildings of state authority as interfering with the functioning of the state or system to the point where “concessions will be forced.” The fact that such tactics will be rejected by most working people and narrow the strategic alliance needed matters not. There is also sometimes insistence that the only moral and/or effective form of struggle is civil disobedience. We have and will engage in this tactic at times but not without regard to its impact on strategy – whether it helps or hinders bringing together the maximum of the strategic forces necessary.
Lenin, in “Guerrilla Warfare” says it is not the job of the vanguard, of the Party, to invent forms of struggle and organization and of issues and demands and create schemes and plans of them. We need to study which forms are developing and taking place and from that what comes next in tactics. He speaks of professors in their studies and arm-chair revolutionaries creating schemes. These are useless systems.
We speak of a united front style of work and of how to work in a coalition manner. We seek to build a working basis of unity based on where people are, not at maximum ideological levels. In a coalition we seek give and take with other forces, a sharing of leadership responsibilities. We oppose anyone seeking to capture leadership or conduct factionalism among the people’s forces and organizations. We seek openness to different views and adherence to agreed decisions. Characteristic of the ultra -left is persistent struggle for control and factionalism which prevents the broad unity of action necessary to mass movements. The ultra-left often approaches such organizations and movements as though the sharper the internal struggle the better. Their aim in participating in demonstrations, etc. is to win people to their idea of revolutionary consciousness, not how to win the particular demand. They want to rope off small sections of the mass movement into their “revolutionary” corral or “hegemony” and continually add a small number to that corral. By the time the last person enters the corral, the first sees the futility of isolation from mass struggles and bolts the corral.
The inexperienced left and the ultra-left often develop schemes of forms of organization and struggle – a universal form of struggle everywhere – a single national center always. Some movements are so big as not yet to be ripe for a single center. Forcing it can cause disunity and problems. Such a single center may not be necessary. Loose coordination and consultation may be the proper form to best serve strategy at a given moment. Will the all people’s front be a unitary organization or even a coalition of organizations or a single coordinating center? While we will always seek wider forms of unity, forcing it can produce the opposite and may not be necessary for effective functioning and unity. The same thing with the form or forms of a people’s anti-monopoly coalition in the next stage of strategy. That is a tactical question of the form of organization which must grow out of the concrete course of development, not some preconceived format.
In a united front style of work, the aim is not to push the coalition as far to the left as possible. That is the aim if you are trying to corral a narrow sector off to the side. If your aim is to develop ever-wider unity in a progressive direction capable of winning the strategic objective of that stage, the bigger picture has to be taken into account and maintaining unity, while the whole advances in a progressive direction.
Another principle guiding the proper selection of tactics so they will serve the winning of the strategic goal and bring into place the strategic alliance to win, concerns Lenin’s often voiced warning to assess the situation and especially its concrete relationship of forces soberly. Wishful thinking will lead to wrong, unsuccessful or even harmful tactics. So will moral absolutes as a guide to tactics. Emotion, anger, a strong sense of working-class morality, have their role and place. But they are not the basis of carefully estimating a situation and its existing balance of forces and of studying the issues, demands, forms of struggle and organization that are actually developing in order to judge the most useful tactics at that point. Once the estimate of the situation has been made, where we are headed, the relationship of forces of the moment and the most useful tactics for the situation, then conviction, fervor, knowledge of what is right and just, can play a positive role.
In “‘Left-Wing’ Communism,” Lenin stresses the importance for revolutionary strategy and tactics to seek and develop all the possible temporary, partial alliances of forces possible in order to be able to move forward faster, further, with less difficulty. We should not hesitate because we know they are only temporary or partial alliances.
Strategy At Other Levels
The national strategy has to be applied and have meaning throughout the Party – every district, club, commission, individual member, publication and institution. The common strategy will be applied to very varied situations, no two the same. Therefore, concrete knowledge and flexibility are needed but everyone’s work needs to contribute to carrying out the same basic strategy through a great variety of tactics.
Elections are key in advancing our antiultra-right strategy. Who are the key members of Congress to defeat in each area, the key people to elect? Which forces need to be brought together to accomplish that – around what issues and demands, using what forms of activity and organization? In addition to Congress, are there key races in the Senate, governorships, other statewide offices, for state legislature, city elections, and how do they relate? In any area the key forces will vary – which unions and industries are most decisive, who are the key racially and nationally oppressed peoples in the area, which are the most important organizations of women and youth? Who represents the ultra-right in the area – the office-holders, the industries that finance them, etc.? Around which candidates can the democratic forces best coalesce, whether progressive or centrist, today nearly all the time on the Democratic Party line? Is support from parties like the Green Party, the Working Families Party possible? If a centrist, how is it possible to press them to take better positions, especially on issues that will help them win, without making that candidate the main enemy and playing into the hands of the ultra-right?
While there are several common national issues of great importance, even these will express themselves differently in each locality, while there will also be issues of importance more or less unique to an area on which there is a difference between the ultra-right candidate and the democratic candidate. Nationally those issues include the Iraq war and the danger of a new adventure against Iran or elsewhere. Another is the danger of repressive racist anti-immigrant legislation. Another is racism related to Katrina, the suppressing and non-counting of the vote of African Americans, etc., civil liberties around NSA spying, detention without the right of habeas corpus, etc., Medicare and health care, education, affordable housing, development and jobs, minimum wage and social security.
The Marxist concept of strategy and tactics can also be applied at national and local levels to particular issues. These play the role of qualitative change on the given issue, while also being part of the quantitative change nationally or locally in defeating the ultra-right. Is it possible to apply the Marxist theory of strategy and tactics to the Iraq war or to the fight to defeat repression against immigrants and open a path to equality? It is possible and desirable to relate these to the overall national strategy in the 2006 elections and their role in defeating the ultra-right.
