Of the communist parties in Western Europe, few have gotten as close to seizing power in the last century as the Italian Communist Party. Over 2 million strong at its peak in 1947, the party of Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti forged a disciplined strategy and leading role in the partisan movement against Mussolini that primed it for victory in the 1948 general elections1. If the memoirs of William Colby, later a director of the CIA, are to be believed, then without the fraud and terror tactics of the US’s Operation Gladio, the Italian Communists would have won 60 percent of the vote2. Given this power, it might seem odd to today’s proponents of “Left unity” that the PCI formed through a split with the predominant Italian Socialist Party less than two years before Mussolini and his fascists would be appointed to power by the Italian Monarchy in 1922.
Some might claim that this split was a dangerous miscalculation resulting from an underestimation of fascism’s danger, yet Togliatti considered the split a positive, even in 1944 on the eve of an Allied victory. He condemned the Socialist Party for “a policy that was contrary to the interests of the workers and that was opening the way to reaction and fascism”3, but more importantly, he viewed the split as necessary grounds for the later united front with that same Socialist Party:
“We know, comrades, that if today I am able to pose the question of unity of action with the Socialist Party; if, probably tomorrow, it will be possible to pose the question of the fusion of our party with the Socialist Party, it is precisely because we were able to give life to this great Communist Party, which has kept faith, throughout many storms, with its fundamental principles”4.
Togliatti rejects any accusation of hypocrisy towards the united front strategy by plainly stating that the current unity of the communists and socialists can only be based on the split and consolidation of the former’s position.
This is a calculation which finds little precedent in Marxism before Lenin. The Communist Manifesto bluntly states: “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties”5. This doctrine results from a period where Marx and Engels largely focused on defining capitalism’s origin and laws while elaborating the theory of communism’s inevitability. The theory of how the proletariat consciously conquers power demanded less attention when the focus was on proving the economic and historic grounds for this conquest. The need for a theory of conquest became more urgent as faith in the spontaneous seizure of power by the Western proletariat proved to be bankrupt. As Lenin succinctly put it in What is To Be Done?: “The spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology”6. It became the task of theoreticians like Lenin to elaborate a strategy for the conscious seizure of power by a vanguard party, one which would lead the proletariat from spontaneous action to concrete state-power.
This is a task which again faces those of us in the West, where the progress of economic decolonization abroad has forced the bourgeoisie to adopt the banner of neoliberalism internally, sparking spontaneous worker militancy, anti-imperialist movements, and the demand for a conscious vanguard. To learn how to be this vanguard, it is necessary to learn the sort of theory from which communists derived the term “vanguard”. If war is truly “the continuation of politics by other means” (an aphorism upheld by Lenin)7 then it follows that the strategies determining success in war may determine similar success on the political battlefield. Hence, we return to Togliatti and the strategy of the PCI. The split with the Socialist Party reappears with clarity once we examine it via the lens of military theory.
Splitting from the PSI was a strategic maneuver, retreating from the immediate advantages of a single, large party representing the left to strengthen the position of a smaller faction whose superior line would eventually earn it a greater degree of hegemony over the Italian proletariat and therefore the PSI itself. The military conception of political strategies was far from alien to the minds of Gramsci or Togliatti: “There had been—to use [Gramsci’s] terminology—a shift from the war of manoeuvre to the war of position, from the immense crisis of post-World War One and the first victorious revolutionary offensive, to attempts on the one hand to stabilize bourgeois regimes and, on the other, to construct a Socialist society”8. Gramsci’s shift to the war of position corresponds with the theory of Socialism in One Country, later vindicated by the Soviet Union’s success in defeating Nazi Germany, thereby setting the stage for socialism’s triumphs in the aftermath of World War Two. Gramsci contrasts the war of position to the war of maneuver because these seemingly contradictory stances actually inform and prepare for each other’s successes and failures at each historical moment. This is how you can have consistency within a party which gained its position and support via a split but later advocates for unity of action with the faction that it separated from.
In the modern era, these kinds of maneuvers remain a desperate need for the Western left to wield its forces to any lasting effect, and the wars in Ukraine and Palestine offer continuous lessons to this effect. In Ukraine, the Russian army’s prudent strategy of concentrating its forces on a flexible defensive line in the Donbass region finds a perfect foil in the Ukrainian army’s nebulous goals for its counteroffensive and their willingness to engage in battles of attrition over symbolic targets such as Artyomovsk/Bakhmut9. Rather than pushing towards Western Ukraine and therefore risking guerilla warfare with Ukrainian partisans, Russia has opted for a slow burn, which even Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admits in identical terms to Gramsci: “… the war is now moving to a new stage: what we in the military call ‘positional’ warfare of static and attritional fighting, as in the first world war, in contrast to the ‘manoeuvre’ warfare of movement and speed. This will benefit Russia, allowing it to rebuild its military power, eventually threatening Ukraine’s armed forces and the state itself”10. Meanwhile, Palestine’s war for liberation makes ample use of maneuver warfare to counter Israel’s technological advantage, and these maneuvers are not limited to guerilla warfare, as explicitly said by Hamas politburo member, Osama Hamdan: “We will fight until liberation. All that is happening serves this goal, whether it is truce, escalation, exchange, steadfastness, rockets: this is a path of liberation”11. The Palestinian Resistance understands the unity of these disparate acts in its fight for national liberation, whereas Israel has already hamstrung itself with unrealistic goals of annihilating Hamas, which even the US has cautioned against12.
These are essential lessons to learn from and apply to the ongoing anti-imperialist movement in the Western countries. What objectives are being sought by our protests and what role do the individual tactics of demonstrations, sit-ins, and shut-downs play in achieving said goals? Should we be focusing on offensive maneuvers, or on building up our position? These questions increase with relevance every time we are encouraged to engage in activities that weaken our forces through arrests or simple expenditure of energy. No ambiguity can be allowed: every action must justify the commitment it entails without falling back on moral mirages that glorify self-sacrifice. Military theory will provide the framework by which we can judge and direct these expenditures.
In learning military theory, we can’t afford a narrow selection. Marx, Engels, and Lenin each found value in Carl von Clausewitz’s On War13 whose Hegelian-influenced14 interpretation of warfare in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars spawned the aphorism “War is the continuation of politics by other means”. We must of course learn from Marxist strategists as well, but without falling into the trap of fetishizing guerilla warfare, a common trend in Maoist circles. The works of Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and Vo Nguyen Giap cannot be idolized over a study of positional warfare, which can be learned via the strategy of Josef Stalin and even the works of Leon Trotsky. It should speak to the value of military thinking that the theoretician of “permanent revolution” was more clear-eyed when he viewed the future of socialism through the Red Army:
“What we need is to go beyond this stage of maneuvering which is only the obverse side of guerilla warfare. I have often recalled that in the first period of the building of our army some comrades said that large formations were no longer needed; that the best thing for us would be a regiment of two or three battalions with artillery and cavalry—and this would comprise an independent unit. Expressed herein was the idea of primitive maneuvering. We have gone beyond this and any idealization of maneuvering would be dangerous in the extreme”15.
While it would be Stalin and Marshal Zhukov who truly enacted Trotsky’s own directive, the fact remains that our understanding of military theory cannot be limited to the Marxist-Leninist canon. Just as we need to go back to Hegel to fully comprehend the dialectic method, our military theory cannot afford to ignore figures such as Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Trotsky.
By assimilating military theory, we come to grasp the rules behind the conscious seizure of power. This does not turn our need for a vanguard party into a need for a military force, nor should it turn us away from considering the objective conditions which determine spontaneous action. As Gramsci said, the goal is not to not to reject the spontaneity that primes the proletariat to understand its historic mission: “This unity between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘conscious leadership’ or ‘discipline’ is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, in so far as this is mass politics and not merely an adventure by groups claiming to represent the masses”16. The stage of spontaneous movement has been set in the West by struggles for liberation from China to Bolivia. To achieve the unity that Gramsci describes, our conscious action must meet this stage with a strategy tempered by military theory; one which leaves no room for performative arrests.
Bibliography
Williams, Paul L. Operation Gladio. New York: Prometheus Books, 2018. (p. 42)
Ibid. (p. 49)
Togliatti, Palmiro. “The Tasks of the Party in the Current Situation.” In On Gramsci & Other Writings, edited by Donald Sassoon, 67-96. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979. (p. 82)
Ibid. (p. 83)
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Washington Square Press, 1964. (p. 80)
Lenin, Vladimir. What Is To Be Done?. Translated by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna. Marxists Internet Archive, 2008. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/. (p. 23)
Lenin, Vladimir and G.Y. Zinoviev. Socialism and War. Marxists Internet Archive, 2005. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm.
Togliatti, Palmiro. “Leninism in the Theory and Practice of Gramsci.” In On Gramsci & Other Writings, edited by Donald Sassoon, 161-80. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979. (p. 163)
Tsurkan, Kate. “Bild: Zelensky, Zaluzhnyi Have Conflicting Views on Bakhmut.” The Kyiv Independent, March 6, 2023. https://kyivindependent.com/bild-zaluzhnyi-and-zelensky-have-conflicting-views-on-bakhmut/.
Zakushny, Valery. “The Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces on How to Win the War.” The Economist, November 1, 2023. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/11/01/the-commander-in-chief-of-ukraines-armed-forces-on-how-to-win-the-war.
Ibn Raid (@IbnRaid). “Osama Hamdan: We will fight until liberation.” X, November 22, 2023. https://twitter.com/IbnRiad/status/1727419341686317261
Panetta, Alexander. “A Worried Washington Prods Israel to Define its Military Objectives.” CBC, October 24, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/washington-israel-military-gaza-analysis-1.7005703
Howard, Michael. “The Influence of Clausewitz.” In On War, 27-44. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. (p. 44)
Bentley, Lorne William. “Clausewitz and German Idealism: The Influence of G.W.F. Hegel on On War.” Fort Leavenworth, 1988. https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p4013coll2/id/1499/download.
Trotsky, Leon. “Unified Military Doctrine.” In Military Writings, 19-30. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971. (p. 26)
Togliatti, Palmiro. “Gramsci and Leninism.” In On Gramsci & Other Writings, edited by Donald Sassoon, 183-206. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979. (p. 200)