Rethinking War of Maneuver/War of Position: Gramsci and the Military Metaphor

Introduction

There can be little doubt as to the significance of Antonio Gramsci in contemporary social thought. His contributions to sociology, political philosophy and cultural studies make him one of the most important representatives of the neo-Marxist perspective. Gramsci’s contributions have not been limited to Marxist social theory, but extend more broadly. Indeed, Thomas states that ‘[a]rguably, Gramsci is today a more popular theorist in mainstream academic debates than any other thinker from the Marxist tradition, Marx and Engels themselves not excluded’ (Thomas, 2010: 199). One of the most important components of Gramsci’s social theory is his discussion of political strategy, particularly his distinction between ‘war of maneuver’ and ‘war of position’. For Gramsci, the classical model of revolution through military insurrection (war of maneuver) has been supplanted within advanced capitalism by a cultural struggle of much longer duration and complexity (war of position). This argument has become a central feature of western Marxism’s shift of focus away from the political economy of capitalism and toward analysis of cultural superstructures (Anderson, 1979).

Despite the significance for contemporary Marxism of Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver/war of position, it is striking that so little attention has been paid to these terms. Scholars have assumed implicitly that war of maneuver/war of position are themselves Gramscian terms, or at least that Gramsci’s use of these terms is unproblematic. In fact, these terms have a history that precedes Gramsci, both in their original military context and in Marxism. There is an extensive Marxist literature on war, ranging from the ‘classical’ works of Engels, Lenin and Trotsky to more ‘contemporary’ works by Mao Zedong (Mao, 1963), Vo Nguyen Giap (Giap, 1970), Che Guevara (Guevara, 2006), Régis Debray (Debray, 1967), Tito (Tito, 1966) and Kwame Nkrumah (Nkrumah, 1968) as well as an extensive literature from Soviet military theorists (see, for example, Byely et al., 1972). This article focuses on those Marxists who were most contemporaneous with Gramsci: Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. An examination of this literature reveals a very different understanding of war of maneuver/war of position from that offered by Gramsci. This alternative interpretation not only is grounded more directly on military theory itself, it also leads to different conclusions about the nature of political strategy and the relationship between war of maneuver and war of position.

Gramsci and the Military Metaphor

For Gramsci, the use of the military metaphor in his analysis of revolutionary political strategy flows from the complex interrelationship between war and politics. On the one hand, ‘every political struggle always has a military substratum’ (Gramsci, 1971: 230). At the same time, however, ‘to fix one’s mind on the military model is the mark of a fool: politics, here too, must have priority over its military aspect and only politics creates the possibility for maneuver and movement’ (Gramsci, 1971: 232). Having justified the use of war as a metaphor for politics, though, Gramsci warns us not to take this too far. The military metaphor is a useful tool for analysis, no more: ‘comparisons between military art and politics, if made, should always be taken cum grano salis [with a pinch of salt] – in other words, as stimuli to thought, or as terms in a reductio ad absurdum’ (Gramsci, 1971: 231).

Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver/war of position is most often associated with the geographic distinction between East and West:

In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. (Gramsci, 1971: 238)

With a relatively underdeveloped civil society, revolutionary strategy in the East required a direct frontal assault against the principal form of bourgeois political power: the state. Gramsci provides a description of this strategy in the context of his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s The General Strike, which Gramsci calls ‘one of the most significant documents theorizing the war of maneuver in relation to political science’ (Gramsci, 1971: 233). He states,

The immediate economic element (crises, etc.) is seen as the field artillery which in war opens a breach in the enemy’s defenses – a breach sufficient for one’s own troops to rush in and obtain a definitive (strategic) victory, or at least an important victory in the context of the strategic line. Naturally the effects of immediate economic factors in historical science are held to be far more complex than the effects of heavy artillery in a war of maneuver, since they are conceived of as having a double effect: 1. they breach the enemy’s defenses, after throwing him in disarray and causing him to lose faith in himself, his forces, and his future; 2. in a flash they organize one’s own troops and create the necessary cadres – or at least in a flash they put the existing cadres (formed, until that moment, by the general historical process) in positions which enable them to encadre one’s scattered forces; 3. in a flash they bring about the necessary ideological concentration on the common objective to be achieved. This view was a form of iron economic determinism, with the aggravating factor that it was conceived of as operating with lightning speed in time and space. It was thus out and out historical mysticism, the awaiting of a sort of miraculous illumination. (Gramsci, 1971: 233)

In the West, however, with its more fully developed civil society, such a direct, lightning frontal assault against the state would likely fail. In this case, revolutionary strategy must be a slower, more protracted process of siege warfare, in which subordinate classes wear away the existing civil society and, through their self-organization, create a new one:

in politics the ‘war of position’, once won, is decisive definitively. In politics, in others words, the war of maneuver subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions which are not decisive, so that all the resources of the State’s hegemony cannot be mobilized. But when, for one reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions are at stake, then one passes over to siege warfare; this is concentrated, difficult, and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is a reciprocal one, despite all appearances, and the mere fact that the ruler has to muster all his resources demonstrates how seriously he takes his adversary. (Gramsci, 1971: 239)

In addition, there is also a temporal aspect to the war of maneuver/war of position distinction. While a strategy of war of maneuver may have been relevant in an earlier stage of history in the West, Gramsci argues that this is no longer the case:

Political concept of the so-called ‘Permanent Revolution’, which emerged before 1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of the Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. The formula belongs to an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still, so to speak, in a state of fluidity from many points of view: greater backwardness of the countryside, and almost complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and greater autonomy of civil society from the State activity; a specific system of military forces and of national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, etc. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, these elements change: the internal and international organizational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of ‘civil hegemony’. The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations of civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be ‘the whole’ of war, etc. (Gramsci, 1971: 242–243)

In the past, strategy was defined by the war of movement, with war of position relegated to tactical uses such as siege warfare. By the late 19th century, however, the relative status of these had switched; war of position had become strategic, and war of movement had become more tactical. Gramsci also suggests that with the rise of Soviet power in Russia in 1917, there had been a shift to the war of position in the East as well. His critique of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution sees it as ‘a reflection of the general-economic-cultural-social conditions in a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic and loose, and incapable of becoming “trench or fortress”’ (Gramsci, 1971: 236). For Gramsci, Trotsky is ‘the political theorist of the frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats’ (Gramsci, 1971: 238). In contrast, Gramsci sees Lenin as properly shifting strategy from the war of maneuver to the war of position with the formula of the United Front (Gramsci, 1971: 237).

Classical Marxist Writings on War and the Military

Femia identifies Machiavelli as the inspiration for Gramsci’s use of military metaphors, but takes this no further (Femia, 1987: 260n); otherwise, Gramscian scholars have taken Gramsci’s use of military concepts at face value. While Gramsci’s understanding of war of maneuver/war of position is clearly influenced by his reading of Machiavelli, especially the latter’s Art of War (Machiavelli, 2001), it is striking that these terms are not found in Machiavelli’s text. There is, however, a literature in which these terms are more prominent – classical Marxism. The most important statements of a Marxist theory of war that are relevant for a critical understanding of Gramsci’s social theory come in the writings of Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.

Engels had a longstanding interest in military matters, stemming in part from his own experience of military service as an artilleryman and of barricade fighting during the 1848 revolution (Achcar, 2002; Berger, 1977). In addition, Engels made extensive study of the major 19th century military theorists, particularly Carl von Clausewitz (Von Clausewitz, 1982) and Antoine Henri Jomini (Jomini, 1977), both of whom developed a theory of modern warfare based on Napoleon’s military campaigns. Clausewitz and Jomini both saw Napoleon as revolutionizing the art of war, moving away from what Jomini called the ‘system of positions’ (Jomini, 1977: 123, emphasis in the original) – that is, a war of position ‘with armies in tents, with their supplies at hand, engaged in watching each other; one besieging a city, the other covering it; one, perhaps, endeavoring to acquire a small province, the other counteracting its efforts by occupying strong points’ (Jomini, 1977: 123) – to a war of maneuver based on speed and the concentration of forces against the decisive point in the enemy’s forces. In their emphasis on taking the offensive, neither Clausewitz nor Jomini rejected defensive war, but they distinguished between passive defense which, by leaving the initiative with the enemy, was to be avoided, and active defense, in which defense was organized so as to shift to the offensive at the appropriate moment.

Engels agreed, stating that ‘as far as the modern art of war is concerned, it has been completely developed by Napoleon’ (Engels, 1975: 547). According to Engels, the transition from war of position to war of maneuver was the result of two major forces (Engels, 1939), one of which took place over centuries and the other a more conjunctural factor. First, the development of firearms was instrumental in this transition. Arquebuses could only be fired from a stationary position, and while the later development of the flintlock musket allowed for more mobility, the slow rate and inaccuracy of fire required organizing soldiers in tight lines that could move only as a whole and very slowly over level ground; likewise, while the development of artillery changed dramatically the balance of forces in siege warfare, its size and weight rendered it largely immobile during combat. Engels points to the development of the rifle, with its greater accuracy, and the development of lighter gun carriages as providing the opportunity for a military strategy based on speed, mobility, and taking the offensive. Second, the specific nature of the French Revolution led to the transition to a war of maneuver. The levée en masse which replaced the royalist army after the revolution was relatively untrained, and so the earlier tight organization of troops was not possible. Because the revolutionary army lacked the supplies (tents, provisions, etc.) which in the past were carried along with the troops, troops bivouacked or were quartered in towns, thereby increasing significantly their mobility. As a result, troops could move more quickly over any kind of ground, and could combine the deployment of troops in more mobile columns with skirmishing tactics.

Engels’s analysis of modern warfare had important implications for his analysis of revolution. In the context of the 1848 revolutions, a strategy of insurrection is grounded in a war of maneuver:

insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority; unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed uprising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendency which the first successful uprising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace! (Engels, 1969: 100)

By the time he wrote the introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 (Marx, 1964) in 1895, however, Engels had modified his analysis of revolutionary strategy. The insurrectionary tactics of 1848 were no longer applicable, he argued, as developments in military technology, urban space, transportation, etc. made the advantages of organized militaries over revolutionaries even greater. As a result, ‘[t]he mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete from every point of view’ (Marx, 1964: 13):

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success that drives the enemy to despair. (Marx, 1964: 25)

Instead of directly confronting the bourgeois military through a frontal attack, Engels argued that a long process of undermining the military from within was necessary before such a frontal attack could succeed. This explains Engels’ support for general military conscription in Germany; not only would workers acquire the necessary military skills and training to fight effectively when the frontal attack occurs, but also a military that has been thoroughly permeated by the working class will more likely refuse to turn its guns on the workers. Engels does not see this long, protracted struggle as eliminating the need for armed struggle, however:

Does this mean that in the future the street fight will play no further role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavorable for civil fights, far more favorable for the military. A future street fight can therefore only be victorious when this unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors. Accordingly, it will occur more seldom in the beginning of a great revolution than in its further progress, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces. (Marx, 1964: 24–25)

In other words, a political war (war of position) is necessary to make the subsequent use of barricade fighting (war of maneuver) effective (Draper and Haberkern, 2005); revolutionaries must not ‘fritter away this daily increasing shock force in advance guard fighting, but … keep it intact until the day of the decision’ (Engels, 1969: 27, emphasis added).

Lenin read Clausewitz’s On War in 1915 while in exile in Switzerland and took extensive notes from the book (Davis and Kohn, 1977). While Lenin’s notebook contains references to Clausewitz’s discussion of military technique, his major interest lies in Clausewitz’s assertion that ‘War is a mere continuation of policy by other means’ (Von Clausewitz, 1982: 119): ¹

Applied to wars, the main thesis of dialectics so shamelessly distorted by Plekhanov to please the bourgeoisie consists in this, that ‘war is nothing but a continuation of political relations by other [i.e. forcible] means’. This formula belongs to Clausewitz, one of the greatest writers on the history of war …. And this was always the standpoint of Marx and Engels, who looked upon every war as a continuation of the politics of given interested nations – and various classes inside of them – at a given time. (Lenin, 1930: 18)

For this reason, Lenin criticized those in the socialist movement who called for disarmament and pacifism and who, in their critique of militarism, failed to identify the specific class nature of capitalist militarism: ‘we cannot rule out the possibility of revolutionary wars, i.e. wars arising from the class struggle, wars waged by revolutionary classes, wars which are of direct and immediate revolutionary significance’ (Lenin, 1964b: 399). Furthermore,

the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state’s victorious proletariat. In such cases a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. (Lenin, 1964c: 79)

Lenin thus argues that, rather than being a dramatic break from the politics of class struggle, revolutionary wars and wars in defense of socialism represent a continuation of that struggle by ‘other means’.

In addition, Lenin’s embrace of Clausewitz is the foundation for a periodization of wars within capitalism that mirrors that of Engels. From the French Revolution beginning in 1789 to the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, wars were of a ‘bourgeois-progressive, national-liberating character’ (Lenin, 1976: 5). As a result, ‘during such wars, all honest, revolutionary democrats, and also all Socialists, always sympathized with the success of that country (i.e. with that bourgeoisie), which had helped to overthrow, or sap, the most dangerous foundations of feudalism, absolutism and the oppression of other nations’ (Lenin, 1976: 5). In doing so, these wars prepared the ground for the eventual development of proletarian revolution. With the rise of imperialism, however, capitalism ceased to be progressive and became reactionary, and so the nature of war changed: ‘the specific feature of imperialist war [is] war between reactionary-bourgeois, historically obsolete governments, waged for the purpose of oppressing other nations’ (Lenin, 1976: 13). The correct position for socialists in this context can only be to oppose imperialist war and ‘convert the imperialist war into civil war’ (Lenin, 1976: 25).

Clausewitz’s discussion of military technique is secondary for Lenin, although it is clear that his writings on the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 reflect Engels’s reading of Clausewitz’s focus on the war of maneuver:

No Social-Democrat at all familiar with history, who has studied Engels, the great expert on this subject, has ever doubted the tremendous importance of military knowledge, of military technique, and of military organization as an instrument which the masses of the people, and classes of the people, use in resolving great historical conflicts. (Lenin, 1965c: 565)

Lenin cites approvingly Engels’ statement that insurrection is an art (Lenin, 1964a) and adds

the principal rule of this art is a desperately bold and irrevocably determined offensive. We have not sufficiently assimilated this truth. We have not sufficiently learned, nor have we taught the masses this art and this rule to attack at all costs. We must make up for this with all our energy. It is not enough to rally round political slogans, we must also rally round the question of an armed uprising … We must proclaim from the housetops the necessity of a bold offensive and armed attack, the necessity of exterminating at such times the persons in command of the enemy and of a most energetic fight for the wavering troops. (Lenin, 1934: 38–39)

Lenin stresses the importance of workers acquiring military training and weapons, organizing fighting detachments capable of mobile action, etc. Armed struggle, though, by itself is inadequate – there must be political coordination of guerrilla action with other forms of struggle:

the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organizing influence of socialism. (Lenin, 1965b: 221)

For Lenin, as with Engels, war is not an isolated ‘military’ activity, but instead reflects, and must reflect, the politics of class struggle.

With the rise of Soviet power in 1917 and the subsequent civil war and Allied intervention, Lenin acknowledged that revolutionary strategy had to change:

Everyone will agree that an army which does not train itself to wield all arms, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, behaves in an unwise or even in a criminal manner. But this applies to politics even more than it does to war. In politics it is harder to forecast what methods of warfare will be applicable and useful to us under certain future conditions. Unless we master all means of warfare, we may suffer grave and even decisive defeat if changes in the position of the other classes that do not depend on us bring to the forefront forms of activity in which we are particularly weak. (Lenin, 1940: 76–77)

Left Communist critics of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which officially ended war with Germany, had argued for the continuation of offensive war in ‘defense of the socialist fatherland’. In contrast, Lenin argued that the civil war and Allied intervention against the new Soviet power required a shift from a war of maneuver to a war of position:

When we were the representatives of an oppressed class we did not adopt a frivolous attitude towards defense of the fatherland in an imperialist war. We opposed such defense on principle. Now that we have become representatives of the ruling class, which has begun to organize socialism, we demand that everybody adopt a serious attitude towards defense of the country. And adopting a serious attitude towards defense of the country means thoroughly preparing for it, and strictly calculating the balance of forces. If our forces are obviously small, the best means of defense is retreat into the interior of the country (anyone who regards this as an artificial formula, made up to suit the needs of the moment, should read old Clausewitz, one of the greatest authorities on military matters, concerning the lessons of history to be learned in this connection). (Lenin, 1965a: 332, emphasis in the original)

For Lenin, the Left Communists’ continued devotion to a war of maneuver, given the new balance of forces, was ‘ridiculous in the extreme’ (Lenin, 1940: 52).

Leon Trotsky, the architect of the Red Army, provides the most extensive set of military writings within Marxism; Gat argues that ‘Trotsky’s articulation of the Marxist position regarding the nature of military theory has no equal’ (Gat, 1992: 373). Trotsky, like Lenin, saw the necessity for armed insurrection given the specific historical conditions that characterized Russia: ‘insurrection, armed insurrection … was inevitable from our point of view. It was and remains a historical necessity in the process of the people’s struggle against the military and police state’ (Trotsky, 1971: 394). While Trotsky does not use the term ‘war of maneuver’ in this context, it is clear that this is implicit in his discussion of armed insurrection. Since revolutionary situations are short-lived, it is essential that revolutionaries take the offensive and strike quickly and unrelentingly: ‘attack is the only proper method for military risings: attack without any interruptions that might engender hesitation and disorder’ (Trotsky, 1971: 209). Trotsky takes this further, however, by suggesting that instead of a clear temporal distinction between war of maneuver and war of position, the war of maneuver (insurrection) contains within it a war of position:

The first task of every insurrection is to bring the troops over to its side. The chief means of accomplishing this are the general strike, mass processions, street encounters, battles at the barricades. The unique thing about the October revolution, a thing never before observed in so complete a form, was that, thanks to a happy combination of circumstances, the proletarian vanguard had won over the garrison of the capital before the moment of open insurrection,. It had not only won them over, but had fortified this conquest through the organization of the Garrison Conference. It is impossible to understand the mechanics of the October revolution without fully realizing that the most important task of the insurrection, and one of the most difficult to calculate in advance, was fully accomplished in Petrograd before the beginning of the armed struggle.

This does not mean, however, that insurrection had become superfluous. The overwhelming majority of the garrison was, it is true, on the side of the workers. But a minority was against the workers, against the revolution, against the Bolsheviks. This small minority consisted of the best trained elements in the army: the officers, the junkers, the shock battalions, and perhaps the Cossacks. It was impossible to win these elements politically; they had to be vanquished. The last part of the task of the revolution, that which has gone into history under the name of the October insurrection, was therefore purely military in character. At this final stage rifles, bayonets, machine guns, and perhaps cannon, were to decide. (Trotsky, 1980: 181–182)

That is, the successful use of military force in an insurrection requires the winning over of the army to the revolution; once this has taken place, the war of maneuver can be decisive.

Trotsky, like Lenin, sees Clausewitz as important for his emphasis on the political nature of war:

There is a prejudice, or, at least, something that takes the outward form of a prejudice, not always sincere, that the army, the science of war, the art of war and the institutions of war can stand outside politics. That is not true. It never was true. It is not the case anywhere, and never will be the case anywhere. One of the greatest theoreticians of military matters, the German Clausewitz, wrote that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’ In other words, war, too, is politics, realized through the harsh means of blood and iron. And that is true. War is politics, and the army is the instrument of this politics. (Trotsky, 1979b: 211)

In discussing the need to create a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, he states that the famous German theoretician of war, Clausewitz, said, ‘War is the continuation of politics, but only by other means’ – that is, the army of a particular country is subordinate to the politics of that country.

From this it is clear that the army of Tsardom was nothing but an armed force adapted to the service of the interests of Tsardom and carrying out precisely the politics of Tsardom. (Trotsky, 1979d: 412)

With the rise of Soviet power, the Tsarist army was dismantled and a new, workers’ and peasants’ army created: ‘Since the working class has taken power, it must, obviously, create its own army, its own armed organ … [It must] build the army on class principles’ (Trotsky, 1979a: 134–135, emphasis in the original). This meant an army made of only workers and peasants, one based simultaneously on the elimination of the old forms of discipline and hierarchy and on the development of a revolutionary discipline based on solidarity. Trotsky saw such an army as not being simply a reflection of these class principles, but also a means of building and strengthening these principles throughout Soviet society: ‘The army and the people must be brought close together. In the actual process of production the people must be brought closer to the army, while the army is brought closer to the labor-process, to the factory and the field’ (Trotsky, 1979f: 184–185). In the context of the low level of cultural development that characterized Russia, the mass mobilization of workers in the military would provide the discipline and skills necessary to construct socialism: ‘the army has to act as educator for all Russia’ (Trotsky, 1981b: 81).

In response to those who argued for the primacy of guerrilla warfare, which had served the Soviet revolution of 1917 so well, in the doctrine of the new Red Army, Trotsky called for a centralized military force:

Guerrilla methods of struggle were forced on the proletariat, in the first period, by its oppressed position in the state, just as it was forced to use primitive underground printing presses and to hold secret meetings in small groups. The conquest of political power made it possible for the proletariat to use the state apparatus to build, in a planned way, a centralized army, unity in the organization and direction of which could alone ensure that the maximum results were obtained with the minimum sacrifice. Preaching guerrilla-ism as a military program is equivalent to advocating a reversion from large-scale industry to the handicraft system. (Trotsky, 1979c: 246)

He argued that the historically progressive role of guerrilla struggle ceases when the oppressed class has taken state power into its own hands:

[W]hat, in general, is the point of the working class taking state power into its own hands if it is not then supposed to make use of this power to introduce state centralism into that sphere which, by its very nature, calls for the highest degree of centralization, namely, the military sphere? (Trotsky, 1979g: 260)

There was, Trotsky argued, nothing inherently revolutionary about guerrilla warfare; the Whites, for example, made use of guerrilla warfare during the civil war. Instead, guerrilla warfare ‘is the weapon used by a weaker against a stronger adversary’ (Trotsky, 1979e: 81). Methods that were defined by the circumstances the Bolsheviks faced in 1917 were not necessarily relevant after the revolutionary seizure of power. Trotsky does not reject guerrilla warfare outright, but sees it as having a positive role only in conjunction with a regular army. At the same time, though, Trotsky recognized that the new Soviet power lacked officers with the necessary military skills to train soldiers in the new Red Army. For this reason, Trotsky argued that it was necessary to accept officers from the former Tsarist army in the new army. During this period of transition, there would be a division of labor within the command structure of military units, with those former Tsarist officers willing to work with the new Soviet power responsible for military tasks and commissars appointed by Soviets to perform political and educational work within these units. By 1920, Trotsky noted that there had been sufficient development of ‘red’ officers to gradually shift to ‘one-man command’ uniting the functions of military commander and political commissar.

In recognizing the importance of conventional military skills for the development of the Red Army, Trotsky rejected those who argued for the creation of a ‘proletarian military science’ that emphasized offensive revolutionary war. Trotsky argued war is an art rather than a science:

There is not and never has been a military ‘science’. There are a whole number of sciences on which the soldier’s trade is based … War is based on many sciences, but war itself is not a science, it is a practical art, a skill … War cannot be turned into a science, because of its very nature, just as one cannot turn architecture, commerce of the work of a veterinary surgeon, and so on, into sciences. What people call the theory of war, or military science, is not a totality of scientific laws which explain objective phenomena, but a totality of practical procedures, methods of adaptation and knacks which correspond to a specific task, that of crushing the enemy. Whoever masters these procedures to a high degree and on a broad scale, and is able to obtain great results by the way he combines them, raises the soldier’s trade to the level of a cruel and bloody art. But there are no grounds for talking of science here. Our regulations are just a compilation of such practical rules, derived from experience. (Trotsky, 1981f: 361)

Marxism is a science, but ‘one cannot construct field service regulations by means of Marxism’ (Trotsky, 1981f: 362). As a result, those who argued against incorporating former Tsarist officers into the new Red Army and for deriving the war of maneuver from the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat were, in Trotsky’s eyes, missing the point. He noted the flexible nature of Soviet military strategy during the civil war and Allied intervention against the Soviet state. Having engaged in a war of maneuver in seizing state power, the Bolsheviks were forced by circumstances to shift to a war of position during the civil war:

the low level of military training and education among the Red Guards and the rebel masses, and later among the conscripts, the extreme shortage of commanders who were both qualified militarily and wholly devoted to the revolution, and the almost complete lack of cavalry naturally forced the Soviet power to adopt a ‘mass’ strategy and a continuous front, with features of positional warfare. (Trotsky, 1979e: 85)

Initially, the Red Army established a cordon system that sought to cover the Soviet Republic from every direction. Such a strategy, however, was not sustainable given the enormous area of the Soviet Republic, and so there was a shift to a more mobile and flexible strategy of war of maneuver:

We leave open, more often than not, wide, even very wide gates for our enemies to pass through; but at certain points in the most important directions we concentrate very powerful strike-forces, with, behind them, in the appropriate places, substantial reserves – and, when we have allowed the enemy to come a long way in, we hit him on the flanks and in the rear, and sometimes frontally as well, when necessity requires this. But we have entirely abandoned our old, primitive strategy of being equally strong everywhere, on every inch of our borders – which meant, more correctly, being equally weak everywhere. (Trotsky, 1981a: 252)

In turn, the end of the Allied intervention against the Soviet Republic was accompanied by a simultaneous stalling of revolutionary opportunities in the West, which meant that the Soviet power would continue to face hostile powers on its western borders for the near future. Given the advantages held by these powers in terms of troops, war materiel, transportation and communication, etc. relative to the new Soviet Republic, a ‘proletarian’ strategy calling on the Red Army to take the offensive to spread the revolution westward was, for Trotsky, untenable:

The pace of development of the world revolution has proved to be very much slower. That means that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class, in all countries, will be intense, prolonged and bitter. It may last not for just a year or two but, if we take the whole world arena, for entire decades, with fresh attempts to seize power, with intensification of civil war, with periods of lull, and with renewed upsurge of fierce struggle. This prospect is, of course, a very hard one, but, comrades, it is not for any of us to change the laws of human development and regulate history. We must know how to wait: to find our way among the objective causes of historical phenomena, and draw the corresponding conclusions. (Trotsky, 1981b: 65–66)

In the absence of conditions that would facilitate offensive revolutionary war, a ‘proletarian’ military strategy based on the war of maneuver was simply an expression of ‘the superficialities of Leftism, here being played to a military tune’ (Trotsky, 1981c: 129). Just as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was significant for Lenin in providing a breathing space for the consolidation of Soviet power, Trotsky saw the need for a breathing space to prepare more thoroughly for future war. He was not renouncing the significance of offensive war, but rather asserting the need for flexibility in the application of strategy in order that war of maneuver and war of position should correspond with the present balance of forces:

only a traitor can renounce the offensive, but only a simpleton can reduce our entire strategy to the offensive … While preserving the principled foundation of waging an irreconcilable class struggle, Marxist tendencies are at the same time distinguished by extraordinary flexibility and mobility, or, to speak in military language, capacity to maneuver. (Trotsky, 1981e: 330–331)

In time, a ‘proletarian military strategy’ may develop, but only on the basis of existing ideas about the art of war and of a Soviet Republic that has experienced sufficient economic and cultural development:

We were arguing not so long ago about when, how and in what period we should create for ourselves our own ‘military doctrine’. We have now become a bit more modest in that regard. I think it is good that we have become a bit more modest. But precisely in proportion as we engage wholly and completely in practical and theoretical working-over of our experience, bringing into this work also the military and political experience of the West, and widening our horizon – precisely in this process are we, unconsciously, without setting ourselves this aim, preparing, grain by grain, the elements of a new military doctrine, which will appear not because he, or you, or I set ourselves the task, sitting down at a desk, of creating it, but because, under the new conditions in which we work over our old experience, we apply existing methods and modify them in accordance with new tasks and new circumstances. (Trotsky, 1981d: 124–125)

The ability to ‘maneuver’ between war of maneuver and war of position based on the concrete analysis of the situation is, for Trotsky, the appropriate course for Marxists.

Analysis

Critical comments on Gramsci’s military metaphor have been limited to specific statements made by Gramsci and have not addressed the core argument. Both Anderson (1976) and Saccarelli (2008), for example, point out that Gramsci’s identification of Trotsky as ‘the political theorist of the frontal attack’ ignored Trotsky’s more nuanced discussion of the relationship between war of maneuver and war of position. In the military debates that followed the rise of Soviet Russia, it was military theorists such as Frunze (Gareev, 1988), not Trotsky, who presented a ‘unified military doctrine’ based on a strategy of maneuver as a ‘proletarian’ strategy. It is noteworthy that Trotsky, whose theory of permanent revolution came to be criticized by Stalin for speeding the process of world revolution along and ignoring the more protracted struggle of creating ‘socialism in one country,’ was arguing for a military strategy of position in post-revolutionary Russia, while those military theorists advocating a revolutionary war of maneuver were associated with Stalin’s political strategy of position.

What is significant here, however, is not that Gramsci was mistaken in his evaluation of Trotsky, but that this mistake is a consequence of a much more significant problem: the problematic nature of Gramsci’s military metaphor. In part, this is the result of a considerable degree of confusion in Gramsci’s writings about the nature of the relationship between state and civil society (Anderson, 1976). At some points, Gramsci sees the state and civil society as separate:

What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government. (Gramsci, 1971: 12)

Elsewhere, Gramsci sees hegemony divided between ‘political hegemony’ (Gramsci, 1971: 246), which is located within the state, and civil hegemony located within civil society; in this case, hegemony is not ‘a pole of ‘consent’ in contrast to another of ‘coercion’, but [is] itself a synthesis of consent and coercion’ (Anderson, 1976: 22). Finally, in a third conceptualization of the state-civil society relationship Gramsci sees civil society as part of the state: ‘the general notion of State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion)’ (Gramsci, 1971: 263). This ambiguity has significant consequences for Gramsci’s use of the military metaphor. In some places, the state is ‘only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ (Gramsci, 1971: 238). This imagery of the state reflects the common interpretation of Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony, which sees it as the principal form of class power in advanced capitalism; in such a situation, a war of maneuver attacks ‘positions that are not decisive’ (Gramsci, 1971: 239). Elsewhere, however, Gramsci provides a different image of the fortifications associated with bourgeois class power:

… in the case of the most advanced States, where ‘civil society’ has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralized, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future. (Gramsci, 1971: 235)

Here, civil society, which in the previous quote is the fortress surrounded by the trenches of the state, is itself part of that network of trenches. In Gramsci’s critical comments about Trotsky discussed earlier, he is even looser in his military imagery, referring to the inability of civil society in pre-revolutionary Russia to become ‘trench or fortress’ (Gramsci, 1971: 236); since the distinction between trench and fortress is a central feature of Gramsci’s counter-position of war of maneuver and war of position, the fact that here Gramsci expresses ambivalence concerning civil society’s ‘military’ function is noteworthy.

This confusion can also be found in commentary on Gramsci’s social theory. Femia, for example, defines hegemony as the ‘inner fortifications’ of class power and emphasizes that ‘[t]he “war of position” must be the fundamental approach in advanced societies’ (Femia, 1987: 206), but then states:

The ‘military’ aspect of the struggle becomes especially important when the proletariat has at last conquered the institutions of civil society and solidified a new counter-hegemony. At this point there remains the climactic attack on the state fortress: the ‘revolution of spirit’ now gives way to the ‘revolution in arms’. (Femia, 1987: 206–207)

To call the state a ‘fortress’ appears to undermine the identification of hegemony as the ‘inner fortifications’; it is a peculiar military strategy that targets the ‘inner fortifications’ before attacking the ‘outer fortifications’. Adamson expresses a similar confusion. After defining war of position as ‘a fundamentally new theory of revolution’ in which ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat loses its Leninist connotations and arrives instead only in a majoritarian form, as an ascending historical bloc which is becoming a state’ (Adamson, 1980: 225), he then adds that ‘[i]f the war of movement is still relevant at all, it is somehow preliminary; the only decisive battles are those in the war of position’ (Adamson, 1980: 226). Here, Adamson seems to accept the conception of the state as an outer set of fortifications which must be breached first before arriving at the hegemonic core, but this undermines the argument that the protracted struggle against this core is the ‘decisive’ struggle only after which comes a ‘supplementary’ war of maneuver. Buci-Glucksmann, in her discussion of the war of position, identifies it as a strategy

that starts by occupying the ‘buttresses’ of the state, its ‘organizational reserves’. This new type of class struggle bases itself on the ‘massive structures of the modern democracies’, which form the ‘trenches’ and fortifications in the war of position. (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 281)

She goes on to say that there may be conditions in which a supplementary war of maneuver is necessary, but only after the successful completion of the war of position:

Under different conditions, and in different modalities, it is still necessary to ‘smash the state’. But the state that has to be smashed will already be a state that has been transformed, deprived of its historical basis, with its mechanisms and hegemonic apparatuses undermined by a balance of forces unprecedentedly favorable to the people. (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 281)

With this level of ambiguity, the distinction between war of maneuver and war of position becomes highly problematic. The significance of Gramsci’s work for revolutionary strategy in advanced capitalism is based on a clear distinction between war of maneuver and war of position. For Gramsci, a political struggle directed at the state requires one form of strategy, while one directed at the cultural hegemony of the ruling class requires another. However, it is not clear from his comments on the state-civil society relationship how subordinate classes can choose between one or the other strategy. For Boggs, the distinction between war of maneuver and war of position reflects the difference between ‘the classical Leninist model of “minority revolution” [based on] the superimposition of a new order from above, which cannot help but take on a mechanistic and elitist character’ (Boggs, 1976: 115) and a model of revolution – which he labels ‘Gramscian’ – which is ‘infinitely more complex and multi-dimensional, with more of a popular or consensual basis’ (Boggs, 1976: 115). Femia likewise identifies Gramsci’s analysis of revolution as ‘the abandonment of the hallowed Bolshevik model’ (Femia, 1987: 53). If the war of maneuver/war of position dichotomy is called into question, the dramatic counter-position of a revolution led by a vanguard party and one based on a Gramscian counter-hegemony becomes less significant. How can the war of maneuver be ‘consigned to a relatively subordinate place’ and the war of position elevated to ‘a fundamental principle, not merely a contingent, tactical necessity’ (Showstack Sassoon, 1987: 197, 200) without there being sufficient clarity about the strategic aims of each form of war?

In addition, the fact that there is a Marxist literature on war which might be relevant for understanding Gramsci’s analysis of revolution has yet to be addressed in a sustained manner. With the existence of a Marxist literature predating Gramsci that makes explicit use of war of maneuver/war of position, acknowledgement of Gramsci’s influence on revolutionary theory cannot itself be based on the novelty of these concepts. In examining how the Napoleonic revolution in warfare as articulated by Clausewitz and Jomini served as the foundation for the classical Marxist analysis of revolution, it is clear that it is the modern war of maneuver, not the pre-modern war of position, which is associated with complexity. In the pre-Napoleonic war of position, war was generally limited in scope: ‘The Army, with its fortresses and some prepared positions, constituted a State in a State, within which the element of War slowly consumed itself’ (Von Clausewitz, 1982: 383). In contrast to a war of position, in which troops were organized in relatively rigid formations which operated best over open fields, war of maneuver allowed for the more flexible organization of troops and their more effective use of uneven terrain. With its reliance on citizen armies (e.g. the levée en masse), it is the modern war of maneuver that is ‘total war’, requiring a military strategy that is inseparable from a protracted process of constructing consent within multiple bases of power:

War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State … By this participation of the people in the War instead of a Cabinet and an Army, a whole Nation with its natural weight came into the scale. Henceforth, the means available – the efforts which might be called forth – had no longer any definite limits; the energy with which the War itself might be conducted had no longer any counterpoise, and consequently the danger for the adversary had risen to the extreme. (Von Clausewitz, 1982: 384–385)

Clausewitz continues:

[S]ince the time of Bonaparte, War, through being first on one side, then again on the other, an affair of the whole Nation, has assumed quite a new nature, or rather it has approached much nearer to its real nature, to its absolute perfection. The means then called forth had no visible limit, the limit losing itself in the energy and enthusiasm of the Government and its subjects … Thus, therefore, the element of War, freed from all conventional restrictions, broke loose, with all its natural force. (Von Clausewitz, 1982: 386)

That is, the very things which Gramsci scholars point to as evidence of a fundamental shift in revolutionary strategy – the greater complexity of a political strategy requiring initiative among the masses for a protracted struggle over multiple bases of power – are, from a ‘militarist’ reading of war of maneuver/war of position, characteristic of war of maneuver. Gramsci’s use of the military metaphor is narrower than that of classical Marxists in that, while continuing to identify war of maneuver with a military strategy for revolution, he redefines war of position in a non-military manner (i.e. ideology); war is metaphorical in terms of a strategy of position but literal in terms of a strategy of maneuver. To the extent that ‘war of maneuver’ is used by Gramsci metaphorically it is associated more with tactics than with strategy. In contrast, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky express more completely the complexity of the strategy of war of maneuver by retaining the understanding of maneuver found in Clausewitz and Jomini.

Indeed, if we accept, as did the classical Marxists, Clausewitz’s and Jomini’s statements on the political nature of war, then the very separation of strategy into ‘military’ (war of maneuver) and ‘political’ (war of position) forms is inappropriate::

Once we grasp the nature of politics as an organized movement which concentrates the coercion of social relations, we can see why the two moments of the ‘dual perspective’ interpenetrate at every level. Since consent is a response to coercion, the passive moment of politics involves a recognition of realities, the winning of support from the masses … Yet consent also involves a response to coercion, a counter-coercion of its own and hence the element of position passes into the element of maneuver … Maneuver, without position, is the untenable abstraction of a pure coercion; a war of position ‘on its own’ implies the mechanical hypostasis of the moment of consent. (Hoffman, 1984: 148–149)

Hoffman illustrates this by reference to the way in which Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, speak of both the overthrow of capitalism (war of maneuver) and the long development of democratic inroads on the power of capital (war of position). Likewise, Anderson (1976) provides a detailed analysis of the significance played by the concept of hegemony in Russian social-democratic strategy from the late 1890s to 1917. In what is generally taken as the ‘classic’ statement of the strategy of the vanguard party, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (Lenin, 1969), Lenin states clearly the necessity to work for the liberation of all oppressed classes and groups, not just the working class. Such a broad based movement requires the integration of hegemonic struggle with insurrectionary struggle in order to create the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’. If armed struggle is not to degenerate into terrorism, military strategy must be informed from the very beginning by political strategy. It is thus not the case that military action is a tactical concern subsumed within the more political-cultural strategy of war of position, but rather that the military and the political-cultural are inseparable parts of a dialectical process of revolutionary change.

Conclusion

The military metaphor has played a central role in Gramsci’s social theory. The significance which Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver/war of position has come to take in contemporary left social theory and political strategy is due in large part to the power of this metaphor. War of maneuver has come to be associated with a relatively one-dimensional strategy of military insurrection, while war of position is seen as a more complex, multi-dimensional strategy of political-cultural change. Indeed, I would argue that this metaphor is central to the assumed counter-position of a ‘contemporary’ Gramscian model of revolution to a Leninist model whose time has passed.

However, the failure to address critically the origins and nature of this metaphor has been an important weakness in commentary on Gramsci. War of maneuver/war of position are terms with very specific histories, particularly within classical Marxism, that have their origin in modern military theory arising from the Napoleonic era. Leaving this history unexamined has two important consequences. First, given the ambiguities within Gramsci’s analysis of the state-civil society relationship, the application of Gramsci’s military metaphor is likewise ambiguous. A political strategy which targets the state as part of the ‘outer trenches’ must necessarily be different from one that sees the state is part of the ‘fortress’. In the absence of clarity on the nature of the state’s relationship to civil society, it is not clear what kind of ‘war’ will be decisive. In addition to being problematic theoretically, this ambiguity carries considerable risks for radical social movements and revolutionary politics. Political strategy which misidentifies the nature of the enemy’s power is likely to be defeated, deflected, or absorbed and thus rendered harmless.

Second, the kind of political strategy most often associated with Gramsci, the war of position, is in many ways more closely associated with the military theory of war of maneuver. In using ‘war’ metaphorically in the context of a positional strategy but literally in terms of a strategy of maneuver, Gramsci has created a situation that by definition separates war (maneuver) and politics (position) and dilutes the metaphor that is so central to his theory. Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, in contrast, offer a more complex understanding of the relationship between the war of maneuver and war of position, the result of their more grounded analysis of military theory in the construction of their social theory. In contrast to the spatial distinction between Russia and the West that is at the heart of Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver and war of position, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky argue that strategy can shift between war of maneuver and war of position over time and even within a given conflict. As a result, their military analysis provides for a more completely dialectical understanding of war of maneuver/war of position than does that of Gramsci.