Military strategy cannot merely be a metaphor in debates about revolutionary strategy and the fight for socialism. A debate with Josep Maria Antentas and Panagiotis Sotiris.

Matías Maiello and Emilio AlbamonteOctober 11, 2026

Below we present a new foreword by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello to announce the forthcoming publication of the English-language edition of the book Socialist Strategy and Military Art. The authors revisit some of today’s central debates on strategy in dialogue with the recent issue of the British Marxist journal Historical Materialism dedicated to the topic.

***

Socialist Strategy and Military Art was first published in Spanish in 2017, marking the centennial of the Russian Revolution. Since then, it has been published in French and Portuguese. Writing this foreword was prompted by the publication of the English-language edition, but it is also an opportunity to revisit debates from nearly a decade ago and to explore their relevance today. It may seem like a short time, but these were no ordinary years; they have profoundly altered the global landscape.

Furthermore, the British Marxist journal Historical Materialism has published a special issue, edited by Josep Maria Antentas and Panagiotis Sotiris, dedicated to the Marxist debate on strategy, offering us the chance to provide a counterpoint here on several of the debate’s central elements.¹ In his article “On Strategy: Thinking with the Military,” Antentas points out the contemporary disconnect between strategic discussion “from below” and military thought. Among the exceptions to this, he mentions Socialist Strategy and Military Art. He asserts, however, that we “address the interrelationship between revolutionary strategy and Clausewitz, not to explore new strategic proposals but to reinforce the paradigm of October 1917.”² We take this objection as a starting point because it forces us to bring to the table a set of current problems and, in turn, the place of theory and the history of past battles in strategic thought.

Let us begin by stating that the thesis attributed to us is very different from the one we actually hold. Socialist Strategy and Military Art does not present October 1917 as an ahistorical paradigm to be repeated. Leon Trotsky himself issued a warning on this matter that is worth reiterating. Addressing those who sought to transfer the example of October to other contexts, he said:

There cannot be the slightest talk of sanctifying into any sort of a law this peculiar combination of a “dry” and almost imperceptible insurrection together with the defense of soviet legality against Kornilov and his followers. On the contrary, we can state with certainty that this experience will never be repeated anywhere in such a form. But a careful study of it is most necessary.

The virtually unrepeatable nature of the conditions that existed in Russia in 1917 stemmed from the combination of a bourgeois regime that had not yet fully taken shape, the widespread arming of the masses, and the previous development of the soviets themselves in the Russian experience of 1905. As a leader of the Red Army, Trotsky pointed out that civil war in the West would necessarily have more elements of a war of position, in contrast to Russia, where it was a war of maneuver, owing to its backwardness and vast territory. He was not the only one to have noted these conditions; rather, this observation would become one of the focal points of debate in the early years of the Third International, later elaborated on in the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci. In our case, we critically appropriate the works of Carl von Clausewitz, Hans Delbrück, and other theorists of the art of war from that very same perspective. We seek to examine the specific crossroads of revolutions in the “West” and to investigate the particularities of these problems in the 21st century in order to conceptualize new phenomena and scenarios for a revolutionary strategy. But this also requires building on the experience of the 20th century, which did not pass in vain. Here, we believe, lies the true starting point of the discussion.

What is the purpose of a theory of strategy? Toward the end of his life, Clausewitz posed a similar question regarding the theory of war. Wars throughout history have differed enormously from one another, ranging from simple armed skirmishes to “absolute war,” in which historical conditions change, sometimes radically. What, then, is the purpose of a theory of war that attempts to encompass such diverse phenomena? The Prussian general knew that theory could not accompany the general onto the battlefield, since there is no manual for winning a war, as some theorists of his time claimed. But at the same time, he responded to those who argued that there can be no theory of war because passions and chance come into play, contending that it is possible to draw valuable generalizations from past experience to avoid starting anew every time.

If war is a true “chameleon,” as Clausewitz pointed out, there are, nevertheless, a series of constant elements — with their various interrelationships — that can be found in every war. He called these the “remarkable trinity” (wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit).³ The Prussian general distinguished, beneath the varied concrete manifestations of war, three recurring constituent elements: “hatred and enmity” as a blind impulse of nature; “the play of chance and probability,” which necessitates strategic calculation; and politics, of which war is an instrument. Each of these three elements was, for him, “more characteristic” of three entities, respectively: the people, the army and the generals, and the government.⁴ He also added a methodological caveat that is central to our discussion:

A theory that ignores any one of [those three tendencies] or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless. Our task therefore is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.

In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we draw — despite all their differences — a parallel between that trinity and the relationship in Marxism among the working class, the revolutionary party, and its leadership.⁵ The differences are enormous, and we elaborate on them there. The first is that neither the party nor a revolutionary leadership is a given, as a government in an interstate war might be. Both must be forged, carving out a path for themselves in the course of the class struggle and amid the frictions between different tendencies within the class itself. In turn, as soon as a leadership emerges, it inevitably rises above the class and risks coming under pressure from other classes. On the other hand, the working class — unlike the “people” in the classical Clausewitzian formulation — has historically demonstrated a capacity incomparably superior to spontaneous “blind natural force.” The creation of the soviets — that is, the discovery of a new political form alternative to bourgeois politics — is perhaps the best demonstration of this, as is the recurring tendency, evident in every acute phase of the class struggle, toward the development of its own institutions of self-organization. Even so, replacing the term “people” with “class” — far from eliminating the question of the relationship with the nonproletarian masses — provides the basis for addressing the central problem of hegemony and its close link to the development of bodies of self-organization such as the soviets or councils.

That said, the conceptual articulation of both “trinities” is the same on one central point: that theory contributes to strategy insofar as it manages to remain suspended between its three poles of attraction — in our case, the class’s self-activity, the calculation of probabilities, and revolutionary politics — without dissolving any one of them into the others. In this “trinity” — as we understand it, that is, historically — there is no form of mechanical discipline between the leadership and the class. Every revolutionary party, to be such, must earn the right to leadership through action alongside the vanguard and through shared experience with the class.

We could highlight two major negations of this threefold relationship in recent times. The first is the apparatchik approach, which Sotiris describes in Historical Materialism as an “electoral machine” — and, we might add, a syndicalist or trade-unionist one — and the “autonomization of the leadership from the mass of the party,” a “plebiscitary-representative” relationship that seeks passive and uncritical support, an “extractive or vampire-like modern prince,” in Antentas’s terms, or a “ritualistic and mechanistic conception of political discipline.” The second is the autonomist approach, which has multiple variants, and which Sotiris rightly characterizes as a “substitution of strategy by ontology” — communism as a normative dynamic derived from social antagonism, without any analysis of strategy or tactics — or as an “anti-strategic” strategy that outright rejects class alliance, tactical retreat, the united front, and the seizure of power, among other similar deviations.

The relationship between those “three poles of attraction” is, in our view, one of the major strategic debates of our time. The starting point is the recognition that without mass self-organization, a party, or a leadership, no revolutionary strategy is possible. But above all, it is a question of the relationships among them. What is the relationship between the soviets and the party, given that without soviets, the party is either powerless or replaces the masses? Where do the soviets or councils — understood not as institutions that can be decreed but as mass united-front organizations — come from? They often arise from modest organizations of struggle, yet they never fully unleash their potential without revolutionaries who consciously fight to develop them against their enemies. In these pages, we address some aspects of these questions by way of an introduction.

Demystifying the Notion of “Soviets” and the Problem of the United Front

Since 2011, there have unfolded open processes of class struggle in dozens of countries around the world. Most of them — especially those that were part of the cycle that began with the Arab Spring and, later, the cycle that began with the Yellow Vests in late 2018 — have shared a fundamental characteristic: the primacy of the dynamics of revolt. There were enormous outpourings of social energy, leading even to the fall of governments, but all taking place within the framework of the continued existence of the very same regimes rejected by the masses, with, at most, a change in political personnel. With a few partial exceptions, these movements largely assumed fragmented, “citizen-led” forms, without developing new institutions of self-organization capable of unifying the mass movement. The vast energy they unleashed was ultimately dissipated or channeled within the framework of the capitalist state, reestablishing a circular relationship between mobilization and institutionalization that allows bourgeois regimes in crisis to reproduce themselves.

In this context, we examine Sotiris’s strategic proposal for an “integral united front.” The latter’s construction is based on an analogy: just as Gramsci defined the integral state as the “entire complex of practical and theoretical activities” that ensures the bourgeoisie’s hegemony, the Modern Prince must be understood as the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities that emerge from the subaltern classes in their struggle for integral autonomy and hegemony. Hence, “today the Modern Prince can only take the form of an integral united front.” It is a front, not a party, because “any adequate political formation can only be the outcome of a convergence of different organizations, ideological currents, and political groups.” And it is comprehensive because it is not limited to an electoral front or a tactical alliance, but rather is “a front that can produce politics, mass line, strategy, hegemonic discourses.” Just as the comprehensive state represents the unity of political society and civil society, the integral united front would represent “the contradictory and tendential unity of political organizations and movements” against exploitation, oppression, and all their forms. Building the party, understood in this way, is not a recruitment campaign but a “permanent constituent process,” which must be combined “with the autonomy of forms of self-organization and counter-power of the subaltern.”⁶

Yet many of the characteristics that Sotiris attributes to the integral united front were already those of an institution that no one devised and that, in many cases, successfully embodied them. We refer to the “soviets” or councils. And not as a uniquely Russian phenomenon: whenever the constituent power of the working class and the mass movement bursts onto the scene, it tends to take on its own institutional form. Bodies of this kind developed not only in Russia in 1905 and 1917, but also in Germany with the Räte of 1918; in Italy with the factory councils of 1919–20; during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with the workers’ and peasants’ councils; in the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 with the workers’, residents’, and soldiers’ committees; in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 with the shoras; and in Chile with the cordones industriales of 1972–73, among others. None were the product of a previous design or preestablished model; rather, they emerged in response to the needs of the struggle, in countries with very different political and cultural traditions.

In their most developed form, the councils tended to be structured around elected and recallable delegates within the fabric of society’s production and reproduction — factories, businesses, farms, schools, universities, and neighborhoods. This enabled them to articulate a wide range of demands and forms of struggle within an alternative power structure. One of their great strengths — which makes them irreplaceable for a revolutionary strategy — is their flexible and adaptable structure, allowing them to immediately express changes, both social and political, that occur in the relative position of the classes.⁷ That is why they can express the constituent power of the majorities at the moment it erupts — something that legal and parliamentary mechanisms cannot do. This cannot be replaced by any coalition of organizations, electoral front, or left-wing government.

The soviets are not a mythical entity, as they are often portrayed. Rather, they are first and foremost mass united-front organizations. They are the product of the unification of the working class and its allies in the struggle against capital and its state. As such, they bring together all mobilized groups, they are not bound by any preestablished program, and they are constantly renewed by the movement. In cases where they gain greater vitality, all political tendencies among the working people have the opportunity to compete for their leadership on the basis of the broadest democracy. For much of the 20th century, these types of soviet organizations faced opposition from the main currents of the labor movement — from social democracy to Stalinism — as well as from militarist strategies that replaced them with parties organized in the form of a people’s army.

By reestablishing a “demystified” conception of the soviet as a mass united-front body, we can chart a strategic path in the struggle to establish such organizations. First, there is no way to establish them without practically resolving the problem of the united front. That is why we devote two chapters of this book to discussing it — from its origins in the initiative of the Communist workers of Stuttgart and its widespread adoption by the Third International to the subsequent developments by Gramsci and Trotsky. This is a strategic battle waged through the tactic of unifying the ranks of the working class across the social, political, and organizational divisions imposed by the bureaucracy, in order to confront the class enemy and, at the same time, wage an open struggle for a revolutionary program and strategy within that unity. The aim is to build a shared experience with workers who still place their trust in conciliatory leadership, or to “march separately, strike together,” according to the formula of the Third International.

A Historical Example: The Greek Case, 2010–15

One of the recent cases in which the problem of the united front arose particularly acutely was the profound class struggle in Greece that began in 2010 and saw Syriza come to power in 2015. This is the backdrop for many of the reflections Sotiris presents in his article in Historical Materialism and also in the original foreword to the Spanish edition of this book, which is included in the present volume.

Sotiris argues that Syriza “lacked both the necessary strategic horizon and a thorough thinking of questions of political power and governmental practice, while at the same time underestimating the ability of the institutional framework — and social violence — of the Eurozone to block any such path.”⁸. It is legitimate to ask, as he does, what would have happened if Syriza had respected that result, in which the no vote against the Troika exceeded 60 percent of the total. At the time, we started from the same question and saw in it a great missed opportunity, in which the tactic of a workers’ government could have played a fundamental role.⁹

But to understand the process as a whole, we are particularly interested in the entire class struggle that preceded Syriza’s rise to power. The united front was conspicuously absent from the period spanning 2010 to 2012, which was marked by dozens of general strikes, mass mobilizations, and clashes with the police. The union leaderships were its main enemies — both the majority sectors of the bureaucracy, with their policy of subordination to the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and other pro-business parties, and, at the other extreme, the labor federation led by the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which, through a combination of sectarianism and opportunism, explicitly refused to unite in action. Despite more than 30 general strikes, each of these leaderships, in its own way, obstructed the united front necessary to defeat the austerity plans. To the left of Syriza, Antarsya — a heterogeneous front that brought together Althusserian-inspired organizations and groups that had split from the KKE, as well as Maoists, Trotskyists, and radical environmentalists — lacked the material strength and influence, at decisive moments, to present an alternative.

Syriza’s electoral rise from 2012 to 2015 is, from one perspective, the political counterpart to the progressive impotence reached by the struggle, which was divided and worn down by union and political bureaucracies into many discontinuous and scattered actions. Stathis Kouvelakis pointed this out at the time: “The 32 days of general strikes, the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, have not stopped a single measure of the austerity ‘memoranda.’” Yet Kouvelakis did not sufficiently address this issue, noting immediately afterward that “Syriza seized the imagination of the people by providing a political translation that so far had been missing.”¹⁰

Sotiris argues that, although Syriza failed in 2015, the hypothesis of a “left-wing government” should not be abandoned, since in Europe it’s very difficult to imagine a sequence different from that of a “severe political crisis” to an “electoral mutiny” by the subaltern classes and from there to a left-wing government emerging from the elections.¹¹ Yet to imagine a different sequence — or even to imagine that same sequence but one in which there were organizations capable of capitalizing on Syriza’s capitulation — it is necessary to start with the strategy of attrition to which the entire movement was subjected before Syriza’s electoral rise. That is to say, we must problematize the absence not of ideal models of a united front, but of mass unity for the class struggle. This was absent throughout the 2010–12 process as a result of the actions of the bureaucracies, without there being a force of similar magnitude — but acting in the opposite direction — capable of imposing it. This is a conclusion that goes far beyond the Greek case; it is a problem that has plagued most of the political processes of recent times.

To address this issue, it is not enough to reflect on political power in general; what is needed is a perspective grounded in the constituent power of the working class and a strategy based on what military historian Lawrence Freedman defines as the “art of creating power.”¹² From this perspective, one of the central questions raised by the Greek process — among others that have unfolded over the past decade and a half — was this: How can a united front be established under existing conditions, with a fragmented working class, union and social bureaucracies conspiring against it, and relatively weak revolutionary organizations?

“Action Committees” as a Means of Breaking the Strategic Deadlock

One of the major shortcomings of Socialist Strategy and Military Art is that it lacks an answer with any real operational value to that question. It was not until several years after the publication of its first edition, and in part thanks to our participation in the political laboratory of the international class struggle as part of the current Permanent Revolution Current — Fourth International (CRP-CI), that we rediscovered a key element in what we might define as a theory regarding how the working class is constituted as a subject in a scenario “saturated” with bureaucratic apparatuses, a characteristic of Western sociopolitical structures.¹³ We are referring to the notion of “action committees,” which Trotsky developed in his writings on France in the mid-1930s.

The starting point is the same problem that Gramsci addressed with the notion of the state in its “integral significance.” If the “expansion” of the state was the bourgeoisie’s response to the emergence of the labor movement in the early 20th century, and among its fundamental mechanisms is the co-optation of mass organizations (unions, social and democratic movements, and others) and the expansion of bureaucracies within them, with their dual function of integrating the masses into the state and fragmenting the mass movement, then the problem of constituting the working class as a subject is not resolved simply by declaring the need to form a united front.

The question that Trotsky places at the center — in the face of the relative strength of the union bureaucracy and the reformist apparatuses (in France at that time, the PCF and the SFIO) and the weakness of the revolutionaries — is how to break the resistance of the bureaucratic apparatuses in order to unleash the power of the working class as a hegemonic subject. His answer lies in the articulation of the vanguard, the advanced and militant sectors, through the creation of institutions for unification and coordination in the face of strikes, demonstrations, street skirmishes, or direct uprisings. These are inevitable in any situation that is intensifying from the standpoint of the class struggle. The task of revolutionaries consists of “unifying them and giving them greater strength,” without letting a single opportunity pass to organize those who take to the streets to fight.

Trotsky defines these action committees as follows: “In question here is not the formal democratic representation of all and any masses but the revolutionary representation of the struggling masses. The Committee of Action is an apparatus of struggle.”¹⁴ He adds that these committees are not convened by statute, nor for a day and time set in advance; workers can elect them only when they themselves participate in an action and recognize the need for leadership. They do not replace the parties; rather, in relation to them, “they can be considered revolutionary parliaments,” in which the parties’ participation is not just allowed but necessary, yet they are “controlled in action” within the committees themselves. Their strength lies in their having arisen from the needs of each process and not from an ideal design.

Nor are they soviets, and Trotsky took care to clarify this. Their task at that time was “to unify the defensive struggle of the working masses in France and also to instill in those masses an awareness of their own strength for the future offensive.”¹⁵ Under certain conditions, he added, the action committees “can transform themselves into soviets,” but that would depend as much on the action of the vanguard as on the evolution of objective conditions. To counter all mystification, he also recalled that the Russian soviets themselves, in their early stages, “were not at all what they subsequently became and in those days they were often called by the modest name of workers’ or strike committees.”¹⁶ We could consider “action committees,” in that precise sense, as the link between the dispersion of conflicts and the united front, and between the united front and the struggle for soviet-type organizations.

These organizations are, moreover, the answer to the imbalance between the available revolutionary forces and the tasks posed by processes of radicalization. In the French situation at that time, Trotsky considered that there was no time to create a party powerful enough to surpass all other organizations before the decisive conflicts, but it was entirely possible in the short term “to win over the broad masses — not for our program, not for the Fourth International, but for these action committees,” which, once created, would become “a magnificent springboard for a revolutionary party.”¹⁷ This is an operational approach that embraces the struggle for the united front when party leaderships block it — which is the rule rather than the exception.

This entire framework represents a very different dynamic from that suggested by the idea of a comprehensive united front proposed by Sotiris to address a set of strategic problems. On the one hand, the idea of action committees offers an alternative to the expansion of an apparatus as a means of conceiving the development of a revolutionary party, where the central focus is on merging with the most advanced sectors of the vanguard. And not just in any way but by jointly participating in action and in shaping the movement’s orientation through debate among the various political tendencies operating to the left of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, it avoids being confused with the strategy of the so-called “broad anti-capitalist parties,”¹⁸ which are divided into permanent internal tendencies where — far from broad and democratic debate — each tendency sets its own orientation without consideration for the rest. This is a structure in which joint activity is reduced to a minimum — generally limited to election campaigns and conventions where each tendency rallies support for its platform — while public figures, whether in parliament or the labor movement, define the policy of the entire organization through their actions. The key point is that, when it comes time to make decisions, these organizations are incapable of doing so. This is not contradictory to parliamentarism or unionism within the framework of the regime, but it is contradictory to the class struggle, and the more acute the struggle, the more so. This was the case in France with the NPA (New Anti-capitalist Party), the majority of whose leadership ended up joining Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front alongside the Socialist Party. It was also the case with the Antarsya coalition in Greece, which split at the very moment Syriza was capitulating; one faction joined the failed Popular Unity project, which effectively proposed a sort of return to the original Syriza.

Faced with this whole set of problems, the action committee has the virtue, to paraphrase Clausewitz, of remaining suspended between the different poles of attraction. It is neither a party nor is it yet a soviet. Nor is it a united front in the strict sense, as formulated by the Third International. In other words, it does not replace the struggle to unify the working class’s mass organizations in order to “strike together” against the capitalists; rather, it presents itself as a platform that brings together forces — primarily those in the vanguard or engaged in struggle but currently scattered — to break the resistance of the bureaucratic apparatuses to the united front. On the other hand, it raises the possibility that revolutionaries can openly contend with other tendencies active within the vanguard to propose a direction for the movement. In short, it maintains a relationship between these three poles of the trinity without merging them: the activity of the masses who take to the streets to fight and find an organization in it; the strategic calculation regarding the articulation of forces to fight for the united front; and revolutionary politics, which involves an open struggle for leadership within the organization, “controlled in action” by the vanguard itself.

The “Integral State”: Unions and Movements as Battlegrounds

The issue underlying this entire series of strategic struggles stems from a specific conceptual approach to the question of the state, which the reader will find elaborated on throughout the various chapters of this book. But it is worth reiterating some points here as part of our counterargument.

Sotiris develops the concept of the materiality of the state by drawing on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, explaining that the state is a “material condensation, that is, a materialised, solidified and institutionalised relation of forces manifest in the class character of its apparatuses, practices, discourses, and knowledges it produces and codifies.”¹⁹ He also highlights its “relational” nature — which he distinguishes from its malleable nature — and from this draws a conclusion that seeks to avoid gradualism, noting that “any strategy of ‘left governance’ can only be thought of today as an institutionally violent strategy, a strategy of ruptures with the existing institutional framework.”²⁰ He adds that, since the state “represents an excess of force on the part of the ruling social bloc,” there must be “a reverse excess of force from the part of the subaltern classes,” consisting of mobilization, politicization, programmatic preparation, self-organization, and self-defense.²¹ Now, if the capitalist state, and not the government or even the regime, were the crystallization of the balance of forces, then a revolution — in the sense of destroying the bourgeois state apparatus and replacing it with another power — would not be necessary for the working class to come to power, provided it achieves a sufficiently favorable balance of forces. At most, one could argue, as Poulantzas does, for the need for “a process of effective ruptures” within the “strategic terrain of the state” itself,²² but nothing more than that. It is no coincidence that Poulantzas himself explicitly rules out the “smashing or destruction” of the state apparatus.²³ Hence, in the conception of the state — in its broad sense — as the “arena of a strategic field,” the need for the proletariat’s transition to the strategic offensive tends to disappear, and with it, logically, insurrection as well. The accumulation of forces is conceived as taking place within the framework of the state itself rather than as being forged for combat.

In response to this approach, in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we formulated an alternative thesis that we would like to restate here. It is not the state that has become a battlefield but rather, since the late 19th century and, above all, the early 20th century, the labor movement:

Faced with the challenge of the workers’ organization that “occupies” a larger political-social territory, the bourgeoisie, through its state, has gone out to fight “outside,” beyond the “public” theater of operations, to wage war within the very organizations of the proletariat (and other “movements”), relying on the bureaucracy as its vanguard in this struggle. In other words, it is the organizations of the labor movement that have become battlefields.²⁴

This does not imply that the bureaucracies of mass organizations are directly composed of state officials, although this can certainly happen. Gramsci argued that what matters is an organic identification between the members of a group and the state: if their spontaneous activity ends up coinciding with the aims of the state, that is enough.²⁵ This opens up a whole spectrum of bureaucracies — more or less venal, more or less “spontaneous” — each of which, in its own way, acts as an outpost of the state within the organizations of the mass movement. Drawing on Gramsci, Fabio Frosini stresses that what is at stake is not a sociological feature of how society happens to be organized but the consolidation of a political strategy, what Gramsci calls passive revolution, that moves into political space that liberalism has left undefended.²⁶

In the organizations of the subaltern classes, the identity-distinction between civil society and political society, which Gramsci discusses, is expressed in the fact that, insofar as they are led by the bureaucracy, those organizations serve above all the ends of the state. But insofar as they represent “elements of workers’ democracy” won by the proletariat within bourgeois society, they can be reclaimed for revolutionary purposes. The trade unions of our time can serve as tools of imperialist capitalism — or of subordination to it in oppressed countries — to discipline workers and prevent revolution, or they can become tools of the revolutionary movement. Trotsky concluded from this that “the neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past.”²⁷ What the “expansion” of the state suppresses is not the possibility of reclaiming them but the possibility of their remaining neutral.

In approaches such as the one developed by Sotiris, the excess of state force is counterbalanced by a reverse excess constituted outside the state. For us, this reverse excess cannot be constituted without defeating the mediation that operates within the organizations of the mass movement. It should be clarified that this concerns not only the unions but also social, democratic, and various other types of movements that are subject to a similar process. The bureaucracy of unions or social movements, as a form of mediation, does not appear as an operative category in the conceptual framework proposed by Sotiris. Bureaucracy seems to be associated only with one of its possible manifestations, namely party bureaucracy. While he addresses the lack of organic links among political forces such as Syriza, there is a gap regarding the strategic struggle over the orientation of mass movement organizations. This omission, it should be noted, is by no means an exclusive shortcoming of our author.

In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we address this problem in a debate with Peter Thomas and his interpretation of the idea of “hegemonic class apparatuses,” which he formulates by drawing on elements from Gramsci’s work. By this concept, he refers to the broad range of class institutions — understood in a broad sense, ranging from newspapers to all kinds of organizations and political parties themselves — through which “a class and its allies engage their opponents in a struggle for political power.”²⁸ For Thomas, the development of this concept is intended to deprive the bourgeoisie of its social base and, in this way, to “neutralize” the capitalist state apparatus. In our view, there is a significant degree of one-sidedness in this approach, insofar as it is the capitalist state, through the bureaucracy, that neutralizes workers’ organizations to bring them under its control. Thus, those “hegemonic apparatuses” are not in and of themselves a “material condensation of the balance of forces”; rather, they have a relative value, even when on the defensive. Depending on whether they are in the hands of the workers’ movement itself or of the bureaucracy, they can be means used by the proletariat to confront the bourgeoisie or, conversely, means used by the bourgeoisie and its state to control the workers’ movement.

At stake here is a fundamental struggle in which the fight against the bureaucracy is not a problem reserved for the day after the seizure of power, nor an issue exclusive to the moment of the offensive, but rather a constant, day-to-day struggle, inseparable from the very constitution of the working class as a hegemonic subject. It is on this terrain — that of the strategic struggle over the orientation of the unions and movements, through the tactic of the united front and the development of revolutionary currents within those organizations — that the “reverse excess of force” identified by Sotiris can be forged. Otherwise, the accumulation of forces continues to be conceived within the confines established by the “integral state.” From this perspective, the lack of organic links that Sotiris rightly points out in Syriza, Podemos, and similar political formations is the necessary flip side of their adaptation to the expanded state. This neoreformism, we might say, is the political form that best accommodates the limits of the current sociopolitical structure of domination, and for that reason, it remains almost exclusively within the realm of “political society,” while the “expanded” action of the state — with the bureaucracy as its vanguard — unfolds in the realm of “civil society.”

The Party as a Strategic Multiplier

If the organizations of the mass movement are the arena where the balance of power is largely decided, the next question is: What force can wage the struggle there? Here, the first difference we pointed out regarding the Clausewitzian trinity comes into full play. In a war between two states, the government is a given, whereas a revolutionary party and leadership must be forged amid class struggle and the frictions among tendencies operating within the class itself, without emerging merely as a reflection of it or as a product of spontaneous struggle.

Sotiris is correct when he points out that “the idea of ‘building the party’ through the expansion of a single tendency cannot pass any test of political exigency,”²⁹ and that recruitment conceived as “induction to a sect” produces nothing but apparatuses. Yet the conclusion he draws from this observation shifts the problem rather than resolving it. If the Modern Prince can today take the form only of a comprehensive united front — the convergence of already-existing organizations, ideological currents, and political groups — the question of origin is resolved by a mere sum of preexisting organizations. This leaves unanswered the question of which political force — with what kind of cohesion, and with what program and strategy — is best suited for the struggle to establish the working class as a hegemonic subject.

In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we address this debate in contrast to the theses put forward by Lars Lih in his book Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context.³⁰ His thesis — that of Lenin’s “aggressive unoriginality” compared to Karl Kautsky’s politics — argues that Lenin does not develop any conception of a “new type of party,” but rather adapts the model of German social democracy to different national conditions. Hence, according to him, the terms “party of a new type” and “vanguard party” are useful “only if they are applied to the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] as well as the Bolsheviks.” To substantiate this thesis, he traces continuities in the formulations of one that reappear in the other and, based on certain common formulations, deduces that their conception of the party is the same. This is where the argument falls short. Both Kautsky and Lenin, in fact, shared the formula of “merging socialism and the workers’ movement” as a strategic objective — a point Lih rightly notes — but the conception of the party is defined precisely by the paths it charts to achieve this objective; it is here that the two diverge to the point of becoming antagonistic. At this point, the response to the emergence of a labor bureaucracy within the mass organizations themselves — as a central new phenomenon of the 20th century — becomes decisive.

Lenin’s innovation is not to be found primarily in an organizational scheme but in the place he assigned to this struggle. With the development of the bureaucracy, any a priori strategic identification between party and class became arbitrary; it was — as Clausewitz would say — instantly placed in opposition to reality. Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, from nearly opposite perspectives, maintained a blurred distinction between class, party, and leadership. The question is: How can we prevent the working class from becoming a “maneuverable mass” for a trade union and electoral apparatus (per Kautsky) without falling into the trap of passively awaiting — however actively — the rise of a class struggle capable of altering the entire equation (per Luxemburg)? The application of Lenin’s response to the “West” is first a practical matter before a theoretical one. It consisted of creating a material force that would operate in the opposite direction to that of the bureaucracy.

There are three central features that allow Lenin’s conception to be generalized beyond the specific Russian context. First, his objective is not to secure formal allegiance from the leaderships of mass organizations to the party but rather to develop revolutionary currents within them. These currents are organized in concentric circles with increasingly broader workers’ organizations until they encompass the unorganized sectors that follow the party “at least in the great manifestations of the class struggle.”³¹ In other words, it is a party defined by its relationship with mass organizations that it does not control and within which it must struggle.

Second, there is a certain continuity between its struggle against Russian liquidationism — the refusal to fight under the conditions imposed by the tsarist police — and, in “Western” bourgeois-democratic regimes, the struggle against the labor bureaucracy, insofar as it fulfills, to borrow Gramsci’s formulation, the functions of “organs of political order, of an investigational and preventive character” within the organizations of the mass movement in order “to safeguard the political and economic domination of the ruling classes.”³²

Third, there is the centrality Lenin assigns to combat. Contrary to an approach that reserves organization and education for “peacetime” and physical struggle for revolutionaries, Lenin conceives of partial confrontations as “schools of war,” and political education as the training of “tribunes of the people” — taken together, they can generalize every instance of oppression into “a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation.”³³ The separation between peacetime and acute instances of struggle survives today in less theorized forms, such as the division between the labor movement and politics, or between struggle during nonelection years and politics during election years.

At this point, the problem of the party becomes intertwined with that of self-organization. What distinguishes a revolutionary party from a left-wing apparatus in general is that its construction is closely linked to Marx’s maxim that the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. Its task is not to “represent” the class but to fight for it to organize itself and become a hegemonic subject. Hence, we prefer to conceive of the party as a “strategic multiplier.” The term comes from military theory. Its origin lies in the concept of a “force multiplier,” which refers to any factor that significantly increases the effectiveness of a military unit, to the point of enabling it to achieve greater results than those that might be expected.³⁴ That multiplier is strategic — and not merely tactical or operational — when it helps transform temporary military success into a political and military position that is sustainable over time.³⁵ Both the revolutionary party and bodies of self-organization can be approached strategically from this perspective: the party brings together advanced sectors around a revolutionary program and strategy and enables them to exert a decisive influence on processes involving millions; bodies of self-organization expand the struggle and unify it when confronted with the state. For this reason, both are situated on the same theoretical level as mechanisms through which the dispersed strength of the class is democratically centralized and expanded at the same time.

Now, of the three “poles of attraction,” the third — leadership — is, like the party, not a given. To situate this concept, it is helpful to start with the formula of the need to “merge socialism and the workers’ movement” that we mentioned earlier, which synthesizes one of the central problems of Marxist political theory. The major trends within Marxism historically emerged from the various approaches taken to this concept. Much of the 20th century was marked, as Perry Anderson notes, by the split between socialist theory and the practice of the working class.³⁶ The bureaucratization of the USSR and the consolidation of Stalinism were decisive factors in this. In new historical terms, this connection remains the great problem of Marxism. The party is not an apparatus external to the real movement — merely amassing militants and resources — but rather the form that fusion takes at each stage. It constitutes itself by incorporating into its ranks sectors of the vanguard that emerge from political phenomena and class struggle processes. It provides what no movement can generate spontaneously: the theoretical, strategic, and programmatic foundations that trace threads of continuity between the great historical confrontations of class struggle. The meaning of these foundations is constantly being reworked and is part of a dispute that transcends theory, extending to the struggle between political tendencies within the working class, which finds its ultimate test in the material reality of the class struggle itself.

The “leadership” wing of a revolutionary party is also the result of unifying these two sets of elements, and only if that unification succeeds does it cease to be an administrative body of the organization itself and become, in its own right, a strategic multiplier. The convergence of currents and organizations proposed by Sotiris is not, in this sense, at odds with our conception; a fusion, however, is not a coalition. Unlike the latter, a fusion is measured not by the sum of the apparatuses it brings together but by the material and moral strength it generates.

If we now return to the formula of class, party, and leadership, we can understand why neither the leadership nor the party is the apex. Instead, they are both different centers of attraction. From this, it is clear that a conception of the party is fruitful only as long as it manages to “remain suspended” between the three. The party, as we understand it, exists within that tension. In other words, it is built by fighting for mass institutions it does not control; it addresses a class of which it is neither a sociological nor a political reflection; and it nourishes its leadership by fusing with new elements produced by each real process of class struggle.

The Problem of Power: Institutionalization and Revolution

Based on the analysis we have just undertaken, we now arrive at the question that ties all the previous ones together: the problem of power. Everything we have been developing converges at this point — from the strategic struggle over the orientation of unions and social movements, which have become a battlefield for the expanded state; through the tactics of the united front and action committees as a means to impose that orientation against the resistance of union, social, and political bureaucracies; to the struggle for mass organizations such as workers’ councils. Each of these issues represents a front in a broad “war of position,” interspersed with sudden shifts to a “war of maneuver.” At stake is the establishment of an alternative institutional framework that can express the constituent power of the working people and transcend the limits of capitalist property rights. The councils are neither a state model to be implemented nor an institutional form decreed by a cabinet, but rather the form taken by the working-class majority, in its capacity to decide on the class character of the social order in different parts of the world and under diverse traditions.

This issue takes center stage when considering the possibility of revolution in the 21st century, and it is also the point where our differences with Sotiris’s argument become most pronounced. According to Sotiris, after the Greek defeat of 2010–15, two main responses emerged from left-wing currents: “This [experience] in turn led the different currents to not see the potential, their vision obscured by the limits of their historical orientation: the more reformist ones turning back to the idea of ‘progressive governance’ the more revolutionary ones to the impossibility, for the time at least, of ‘repeating October.’”³⁷

Distancing himself from both, Sotiris leans toward a third response — one long present in strategic discussions — that involves a combination of forms of self-organized, “bottom-up” alternative power and the capitalist state. The formulation he proposes is as follows:

The question is how to permanently mobilise such mass collective participation and politicisation. It is one thing to have this kind of collective mobilisation and participation during moments of crisis and amidst a sense of abandonment, and another to maintain this when things seem to return to normal. At the same time, unless some of the gains from the exercise of such forms of counter-power from below, or dual power, are transformed into actual institutional arrangements, sanctioned by the power of the state, then they become precarious. Such an antagonistic institutionality from below also points to ways of thinking about movements in a strategic manner.³⁸

Of course, the struggle for self-organizing institutions within the mass movement does not take the same forms during periods of radicalization of the class struggle as it does during periods when the movement ebbs. Key to addressing this problem is the relationship between these institutions and the revolutionary party — not as an apparatus but as a fluid relationship for organizing the most advanced sectors of the movement.

Sotiris’s argument — that the gains of counterpower from below must be transformed into “actual institutional arrangements, sanctioned by the power of the state” so as not to become precarious — is not new. It is, in essence, an approach similar to the one proposed by Rudolf Hilferding in 1919 when he suggested enshrining the workers’ councils that emerged from the German Revolution in the Weimar constitution.³⁹

The councils were thus sanctioned by the power of the capitalist state, and precisely for that reason, they turned into appendages of the government. Trotsky defined that proposal as the intention to “‘combine’ a third type of state by wedding the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the proletarian dictatorship under the sign of the constitution.” In his strategic approach, “class organs of the workers and poor peasants, whether you give them the name of Soviets or committees, always constitute organizations of struggle against the bourgeois state, then become organs of insurrection, to be transformed finally, after the victory, into organs of the proletarian dictatorship.”⁴⁰

This is a central issue of strategy, one that we analyze in this book. As they develop, bodies of self-organization are means of struggle that are defensive but prepare the transition to the offensive. If, at the decisive moment, that transition fails, they are transformed into their opposite. State sanction is not a neutral foothold that consolidates what has been won but rather the mechanism through which bodies of self-organization lose their constituent character.

Dual power is not a regime that can stabilize but rather an acute expression of state crisis. Even if the revolution in the West has to confront a fully formed bourgeois state — unlike what occurred in the Russian Revolution — and faces entrenched mechanisms of capitalist democracy, this does not mean it will be facing a stable state apparatus or a stable bourgeois-democratic regime. On the contrary, the very possibility of revolutionary events presupposes a fairly advanced disintegration of the capitalist state as a whole.⁴¹

In turn, the soviets or councils are not a constitutional fact but a revolutionary one; they do not presuppose any formal balance of forces. The integration of self-organizing bodies into the state is a specific form that the resolution of “dual power” takes in favor of the bourgeoisie when there is no open military defeat.

In the case of Poulantzas — Sotiris’s primary reference for thinking about the materiality of the state — the problem is framed from the perspective of how to prevent a situation of dual power from arising. His “democratic road to socialism” sought to articulate the transformation of representative democracy with the deployment of direct democracy from below, and the question he posed to himself was how to regulate the “inevitable” conflicts between the two “without leading, slowly but surely, to an embryonic or fully fledged situation of dual power.” Such a situation, he said, “even when two forces of the Left are involved … in no way resembles a free play of powers and counter-powers balancing one another for the greatest good of socialism and democracy.”⁴² Consistent with this, his strategy was to prevent grassroots democratic organizations from becoming centralized into an alternative power structure. For this reason, he maintained that “if they are to modify the relations of power, such struggles or movements cannot tend towards centralization in a second power; they must rather seek to shift the relationship of forces on the terrain of the State itself.”⁴³

This is where Poulantzas’s and Sotiris’s arguments converge, albeit through different paths. One seeks to prevent bodies of self-organization from centralizing into an alternative power, while the other aims for their gains to be consolidated through state sanction. In both cases, what is excluded is precisely what defines the strategic potential inherent in situations of dual power, namely the tendency of these organizations to unify into an alternative power capable of defeating the capitalist state. Yet, as we noted at the outset, our critique does not stem from the idea of repeating October, nor from responding to a 21st-century problem with a formula from 1917. There is a later experience that confirmed this strategic approach even more conclusively: the Portuguese Revolution.

Portugal 1974–75: Constituent Power “from Below” and Its Enemies

In just 19 months, the Portuguese Revolution encapsulated some of the most significant experiences of dual power in the 20th century. After the outbreak of the revolution on April 25, 1974, social upheaval was of such magnitude that, as Raquel Varela points out, historians have been unable to determine with certainty how many mobilizations took place in the first week in workplaces and neighborhoods. From then on, the process was organized in a variety of working-class institutions. Works councils — according to some estimates, as many as 4,000 nationwide — emerged in the heat of the assemblies and the struggle against layoffs. They became the central organizational structure of the Portuguese working class, with a presence in workplaces incomparably greater than that of the unions. Residents’ committees functioned as genuine local decision-making bodies, acting as a parallel power to municipal governments, and the housing occupations they spearheaded caused a historic drop in the value of urban land. In the south of the country, hundreds of thousands of acres were occupied. With the crisis of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), soldiers’ committees — including the SUV (Soldados Unidos Vencerão), which proposed the election of commissions “elected and revocable at any time” — brought dual power to the last bastion of state power.⁴⁴

On this point, Varela adopts the existence of dual power as the central criterion for defining the revolutionary process — that is, “the presence of an alternative power, whether organic or inorganic, embryonic or organized, or even coordinated/organized on a national scale.”⁴⁵ At issue in the Portuguese case, she notes, is the scope of that power, “and not whether it existed or not. The key question is how far it went and what forms it took — that is, what form this power parallel to the state assumed. In other words, to what extent the state was unable to impose its power.”⁴⁶ Her conclusion regarding the outcome is that

from September 1975 to November 1975, the revolutionary crisis unfolded … that historical period of revolutions in which either a displacement of the state occurs under the aegis of the workers or a coup d’état brings the revolution to an end; these periods are marked by the bourgeoisie’s refusal to accept expropriation and by the outbreak of civil war. During this period, the state is unable to govern, and the duality of power becomes widespread at all levels, with all state measures rendered impossible by strikes, demonstrations, and occupations. … The PS [Socialist Party], along with the entire right wing and the Group of Nine,⁴⁷ is determined to put an end to the process through a coup d’état. The PCP [Portuguese Communist Party] relies on mobilization to secure agrarian reform and (possibly) Angola’s independence under the leadership of the MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola]. The military left, drawing strength from a situation of widespread dual power within the barracks, will reflect the general mobilization of society; however, neither does the military left have a coherent political project, nor are the organs of workers’ and popular power centralized at the national level into what would be a “soviet” capable of resisting the coup.⁴⁸

Here lies, in our view, one of the cruxes of the entire experience, which points directly to the issues we have been discussing. The absence of centralization was neither a given nor a spontaneous shortcoming of the movement. There were persistent tendencies toward the formation of embryonic structures for the national coordination of organs of workers’ and popular power, such as the Revolutionary Councils of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors (CRTSM), the Setúbal Struggle Committee, the Coordinating Committee of Metalworkers’ Committees, the Works Councils of the Lisbon Industrial Belt, and the Coordinating Committee of Workers’ Committees. At the first CRTSM conference in April 1975, one of the topics discussed was the need to create a national coordinating body for the workers’ committees. In September of that same year, the intercommissions within the Lisbon Industrial Belt began discussing whether there should be a national coordinating body for the commissions. These trends, however, faced staunch opposition.

The PCP, as Varela documents, invested enormous effort in building a single trade union federation, the Intersindical, which it explicitly conceived as a counterweight to the works councils. It promoted committees of union delegates to compete with the works councils in the workplace — delegates who, in many cases, had not been elected by the workers or did not even work at the factory. It also accused the works councils of being “ultra-leftists” and of “playing into the hands of the right.” This led it to subordinate the slogan of workers’ control to the “battle for production,” that is, to the containment of demands it considered “unrealistic.” The union congress of July 1975 banned the right to form factions, which made it practically impossible to challenge leadership from within, and tied the unions to government policy. All this was inseparable from the PCP’s policy of alliances, aimed at participating in a popular front government of national unity with sectors of the Portuguese bourgeoisie.⁴⁹

In other words, there was not a single tendency but two opposing tendencies, and the relationship between them was decisive for the overall process. On the one hand, there was the committees’ tendency toward the emergence of a constituent power capable of defeating the bourgeois state. On the other hand, there was the tendency toward the regimentation of mass movement organizations and their fragmentation, the concentrated political expression of which was the popular front that brought together the PS, the PCP, and the MFA. What prevented the centralization of the self-organized bodies was not the immaturity of the Portuguese masses — who multiplied their own institutions in every sphere, including the army — but rather the role of bureaucratic apparatuses within the movement as an advance guard of the state. The absence of anything resembling a national “soviet”-type structure was, to a large extent, the result of a war waged within the organizations of the working class, a war that was lost.

In “Perspectives on Dual Power in the Portuguese Revolution, from Nicos Poulantzas to Raquel Varela,” Sotiris frames the problem differently. He rightly acknowledges that the strength of Varela’s approach lies in shifting the focus from the political decisions of actors to social dynamics viewed from below, and he asserts — in contrast to Poulantzas, who downplayed the existence of dual power in the Portuguese Revolution — the reality of these forms. But he does so by reformulating the concept of dual power in a way that is detached from the central strategic issues. For Sotiris, dual power becomes “various forms of reclaiming social power, control over aspects of social production and reproduction, as well as experimentation with new social and political configurations that point toward a post-capitalist orientation.” It does not represent “the ‘fait accompli’ of a new hegemony and a new political power, but rather an indispensable condition, both in the sense of a laboratory for new forms of politicization and intellectual life … and in the creation of a radically different balance of power.” Hence, his methodological conclusion is that “crucial strategic issues should not be thought of simply in ‘military’ terms, such as preparation for a confrontation, but also as a way to unleash experimental, prefigurative, and self-educational potential.”⁵⁰

Bodies of self-organization are, in effect, schools where the masses discover their own capacity, and that formative dimension is inseparable from their strategic value. But when dual power is redefined as a long-term prefigurative condition rather than as a struggle for sovereignty between classes, what becomes blurred is precisely what determined the outcome in Portugal. The question Portugal left open is not whether there were laboratories for new forms of politicization — there were, and on a massive scale — but why those laboratories failed to coalesce into a power capable of asserting itself. That question is not answered in the realm of the prefigurative but rather in the struggle against the mediations that worked against that perspective.

In the conclusion of her book, Varela points out that the Portuguese representative democratic regime is not a continuation of the Estado Novo interrupted by the revolution, nor is it a continuation of the revolution itself; rather, it is the continuation of its abrupt interruption, of its defeat. “Thus,” she notes, “conceptually it is more accurate to consider that direct democracy is the offspring of the revolution and representative democracy that of the counterrevolution.”⁵¹ Portugal was the first major test of what we refer to in chapter 9 of this book as “democratic counterrevolution,” namely, a political strategy through which the European bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialism — which had propped up the Portuguese dictatorship for decades — usurped the democratic aspirations of the masses and used those very banners to stifle the revolutionary process and self-organization. In the absence of a strong revolutionary party, as Trotsky warned, “a combination of semireforms, left phrases, and gestures still more to the left, and of reprisals, can prove to be of much more effective service to the bourgeoisie than fascism.”⁵²

We could say that the institutionalization of the counterpower’s gains, “sanctioned by state power,” was no guarantee against precariousness but rather part of the operation that led to the liquidation of the last great revolution in western Europe to date. The 1976 Portuguese Constitution did indeed enshrine certain gains — including workers’ committees — but it did so at the cost of reducing them to a constitutional provision. Within this framework, the neoliberal counterrevolution would gradually consolidate over the years. The strategic problem does not lie in stabilizing the duality of powers but in resolving the issue that Portugal left unresolved, which, on another level, is similar to the strategic issue that remained pending in the major processes of class struggle over the past decade and a half: that is, how to develop and articulate, against the resistance of the state apparatuses, the dispersed institutions generated by class struggle until they constitute a power capable of defeating the capitalist state.

The Military Is Less and Less a Metaphor

This way of conceptualizing the problem of dual power connects to another of the major themes we address in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, namely, the transition to insurrectional offensive and the problems of civil war. Political-military issues are notably absent from the special issue on strategy in Historical Materialism, beyond occasional mentions.

Political-military issues and physical confrontations are by no means confined to scenarios of insurrectional offensives aimed at seizing power; rather, they accompany — with varying degrees of intensity — the development of the class struggle. Hence, it is futile to pit political struggle against physical struggle, because “it is impossible to check at will the political struggle when it transforms itself, by force of inner necessity, into a physical struggle.”⁵³ The development of self-defense depends on the scale of the struggle and the level of confrontation, ranging from picket lines in a particular conflict to workers’ militias when clashes become widespread. The fact is that the stronger the struggle, the stronger capital’s counterattack will be.

This is a central and increasingly pressing issue when we consider the Bonapartist attempts that have become commonplace in the heat of the crisis of the bourgeois-democratic regimes. Within this framework, we see, for example, the development of institutions such as ICE in the United States, which employs tactical units with paramilitary characteristics. Added to this is the existence of fascist gangs that, although their development has not progressed beyond an initial stage, are a phenomenon we can observe in various countries. There is the emergence of Golden Dawn in Greece at the height of the general strike cycle against the Troika,⁵⁴ neo-Nazi gangs in Germany, as well as far-right American militias such as the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer.

Historically, when class struggle intensifies and the normal mechanisms of legal repression prove insufficient, the reliance on armed parastatal or private gangs to strike at the vanguard and sever its ties with the mass movement has been a constant.⁵⁵ In response to this, Trotsky argued in the Transitional Program that if the gangs of the union bureaucracy and private thugs are the fundamental cells of the army of fascism, picket lines are the fundamental cells of the army of the proletariat. In the face of escalating confrontations, he pointed to the workers’ militia as “the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings, and press.”⁵⁶ Ultimately, this is a matter of the defensive violence of the masses against the offensive violence of the exploiters. But, like any defense worthy of the name, it is not mere resistance; rather, the development of self-defense builds the material — and moral — strength for more decisive confrontations.

This also lies at the heart of the issue of soviets or councils. Trotsky, echoing Lenin, pointed out that the soviets of the February 1917 period “embodied only demi-power.”⁵⁷ This was the case not only because the soviets were led by conciliators, but also because they were unarmed. As we discuss in chapter 2, the Red Guard — the militia answerable to the factory committees — was practically unarmed and persecuted, while the Provisional Government controlled the citizen militia and, through the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, those sectors of the army that had defected to the revolution. Only when, in the face of Kornilov’s attempted coup, the Red Guards armed themselves under Soviet law and the Revolutionary Military Committee began to contest command of the garrison did the soviets become a genuine power and resolve the situation of dual power in their favor.⁵⁸

In chapter 3, we analyze the central importance of the Third International to the question of tactics and the workers’ government, noting that in the “Resolution on Tactics” of its Fourth Congress, the Comintern held that “the most elementary tasks of a workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat [and] disarm the bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations,” among other points. It added that such a government “is possible only if it is born out of the struggle of the masses and is supported by combative workers’ organizations.”⁵⁹ This distinguished a revolutionary workers’ government from all those variants of what are today commonly called “left-wing governments.” In this sense, military issues — far from being a metaphor — permeate questions of defense, dual power, and government even before the insurrection.

That said, we come to another of the major omissions in Historical Materialism’s special issue on strategy — perhaps even more striking than the previous one. We are referring to the problem of war, as well as the relationship between war and revolution. In recent years, the issue of war — from Ukraine in 2022 to Iran today — has been a major determinant of the entire global situation and an essential starting point for any strategic thinking in the twenty-first century.

Antentas’s article addresses these topics. In it, he distinguishes three aspects of the Marxist study of military thought — the analysis of war and its relationship to capitalism; the politico-military problems of revolution; and the borrowing of concepts and metaphors for everyday political strategy — and states that “this article will be limited to this third level.”⁶⁰ This is a legitimate choice, but the consequence is that everything in the Marxist tradition that constituted a real relationship between politics and war is confined to the partial problem of analogies.

This book argues at length against such a reduction to purely metaphorical readings. The decisive distinction does not lie between those who use military metaphors and those who do not, but between two approaches that we might exemplify with Kautsky and Lenin. For the former, military strategy was primarily a source of metaphors, and his appropriation of the military historian Hans Delbrück served to counter Luxemburg’s criticisms. With the First World War, this position became untenable. Lenin’s critical appropriation of Clausewitz’s formula — war as the continuation of politics by other means — in his 1915 notebooks is of a different order; it is no longer a simple metaphor for politics but rather the tool for establishing the precise relationship, in the new era, between revolution — civil war — and interstate war. In the famous “Tetradka,” which Carl Schmitt himself — a reactionary but serious thinker — defined as “one of the greatest documents in the history of world and intellectual history,”⁶¹ Lenin takes as his starting point Clausewitz’s formula that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but that formula compels him to answer a preliminary question: What is politics? For liberalism, politics is the administration of the state. For Lenin, following Marx, politics is the concentrated expression of the struggle between classes for state power. When Lenin reads Clausewitz, he alters the meaning of the formula, and from this, two major conclusions are reaffirmed. The first is that a revolution is not simply a spontaneous outburst but rather the continuation of the political struggle when the crisis of the state brings the confrontation to a decisive level. The second is that neither the party nor the insurrection can be guided by purely military criteria; rather, force makes sense only if it serves political objectives defined by class struggle. Lenin does not merely borrow a vocabulary; he argues that war and revolution belong to the same continuum. That is why the issue of the army — questions such as policy toward soldiers and workers’ militias, among others — is not a militaristic appendix in this book but a necessary consequence of strategic reflection.

In this sense, it is telling that an entire issue devoted to thinking about strategy today makes no mention of the war in Ukraine or Gaza, and that the Palestinian people are mentioned only in passing in a list of causes for solidarity. This is not a criticism of scope but a strategic problem. It is one of the issues that has changed the most from 2017 — when we first published this book — to the present. At that time, the return of interstate war between great powers was a prediction derived from the analysis of the decline of U.S. hegemony. Today, it is the factor that determines the global situation as a whole. Ukraine marked the return of interstate war between major powers — with the United States and NATO acting by proxy — and signaled the beginning of an open challenge, including a military one, to the world order that emerged from the “bourgeois restoration.”⁶² It disproved the idea, widespread since the 1990s, of an “exhaustion of interstate war” and its definitive replacement by “wars within the population.” As recently as 2005, British general Rupert Smith asserted that ““war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists,” and dated the last real tank battle to 1973.⁶³ Ukraine has once again brought precisely that type of war to the forefront. The State of Israel’s genocide against Gaza destabilized the entire Middle East. The trade war and military tensions between the United States and China represent another chapter in the same process. The war in Iran and the United States’ strategic defeat there mark a Copernican shift in the global situation, one that bears similarities to what Vietnam once represented. Trump is dismantling U.S. “soft power,” and this is reigniting anti-imperialist sentiments. The deep-seated trends of the imperialist era of wars, crises, and revolutions — as Lenin called it — are once again coming to the forefront.

Moreover, the relationship between war and revolution is not just one topic among many but a thread that runs through the entire history of revolutions. Most major revolutions have been linked to wars: the Paris Commune arose from the Franco-Prussian War; the Russian Revolution of 1905, from the defeat of tsarism in the Russo-Japanese War; the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918 from World War I; the Chinese Revolution, as well as the Yugoslav and Vietnamese revolutions, from World War II; and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 was sparked by the colonial wars. War takes the contradictions of class society to the extreme, disrupts state apparatuses, and puts all political leaderships to the test. That is why one of the major contradictions facing imperialist powers in waging large-scale war — and even in implementing measures such as a return to mass conscription — is how to capitalize on it politically without opening a Pandora’s box of revolution. To this day, what has limited the use of capital’s destructive forces has been politics — not diplomacy but the impossibility of winning such a war without unleashing a revolution and risking the loss of power.⁶⁴ Hence, Lenin’s slogan of transforming imperialist war into revolution was not an abstract exhortation but the conclusion reached by analyzing the relationship between war and revolution.

Today, it is not an option to discuss revolutionary strategy without bringing war into the picture. The military is increasingly less of a metaphor for the political, while war itself increasingly acts as the last resort in political alignments. This is not about militarizing politics, against which Gramsci rightly warned. Rather, as the tendency grows for world powers to once again settle the division of the world by force of arms, the relationship between politics and war ceases to be a source of analogies and once again becomes a central issue of strategy.

Grand Strategy and Internationalism

If the relationship between politics and war once again becomes a central issue of strategy, so too does internationalism. In his discussion of the concept of “grand strategy,” Antentas writes that we use the term, in reference to the Cold War debate, “as a synonym for a ‘global strategy’ on an international scale for the class struggle, understood on the basis of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. However, they do not indicate the benefits of using the term ‘grand strategy’ rather than simply ‘strategy’ to think about revolutionary strategy, beyond a terminological adjustment.”⁶⁵

We do point out the benefits of this choice of terminology, and it is worth reiterating them because they encapsulate the overall argument. If revolutionary strategy links isolated struggles to the political goal of the proletariat’s seizure of power, “grand strategy” — which we understand in terms of the theory-program of permanent revolution — globally links the onset of the revolution on a national scale with its international development and its worldwide culmination, as well as the conquest of power with transformations in the economy, science, and social customs. The goal is a society of “free and associated producers,” or communism. While “grand strategy” — as a synonym for “national security strategy” — has an imperialist state as its subject, ours is based on a class-based and international subject, and the framework within which the “final outcomes” are assessed ceases to be international politics in general and becomes the global class struggle. This is not a higher level of the same national strategy but a change in subject, framework, and political objective. Whether this is a good reason to adopt the term is debatable, but we do not believe, as Antentas suggests, that it is merely a terminological adjustment.

Clausewitz noted that “if war is part of policy, policy will determine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war.”⁶⁶ The forces that can be unleashed depend on the magnitude of the objectives set by politics. “Small politics” — which, in Gramsci’s words, is concerned with “the partial and everyday issues that arise within an already established structure” — mobilizes only small forces, especially in terms of moral force; “great politics,” which “encompasses issues related to the founding of new states,” can mobilize enormous forces.⁶⁷

Understood as a broad strategy, the programmatic theory of permanent revolution asserts that class struggle, and not “national interest,” is the organizing principle that integrates the multiple levels — economic, social, military, and even moral — within which politics predominates. Unlike nation-states, which by principle carry the struggle to impose their raison d’état onto the international stage through war, the working class possesses interests that can give rise to a politics that transcends national borders. This is the only known grand strategy that aims to eliminate the distinction between oppressed countries and imperialist countries — and with it, conflicting national interests, the nation-state, and war itself. With this in mind it is essential to develop and update this strategy for the current scenario.⁶⁸

Hence, anti-imperialism is not merely a chapter in our program but a component of the grand strategy. In the periphery, the revolution begins as a democratic revolution, bringing the working class to power, and develops into a socialist revolution, becoming a link in the world revolution. In imperialist countries, it takes on a socialist character from the outset, but the proletariat’s rise to power has far-reaching democratic consequences for oppressed nations, because it can liberate them from the imperial yoke in a single stroke. Allowing for the differences, the articulation of the revolution between East and West constitutes a kind of “southern question” on a global scale. The Portuguese Revolution is perhaps one of the most concrete examples in the 20th century of the permanent revolution in terms of the relationship between oppressed peoples and the revolution in the metropolises, where the relationship between center and periphery ceases to be a relationship between two separate spheres and becomes one.

In his review of Socialist Strategy and Military Art, Sotiris points out that the book tends to present Trotsky “in an almost hagiographical way, in the sense of suggesting the correctness of all [his] positions.”⁶⁹ It would be ridiculous to think that Trotsky was right about everything — he was wrong, and not infrequently, like any revolutionary who has been on the front lines of the class struggle for four decades — just as it would be ridiculous to read his texts as if they were sacred scriptures. What Sotiris interprets as hagiography is, in reality, the recognition that Trotsky, despite his errors, laid the foundations for a thorough critique of Stalinism that no other Marxist ever managed to carry out. The 20th century was not in vain, and for that reason, we believe it is essential to build on this foundation for strategic reflection today. Trotsky’s radical critique of Stalinism also casts a shadow over the trajectory of Eurocommunism, which broke with Moscow but kept intact that strategic core of class collaboration, revolution in stages, and the national path. These were critics who saw in Stalinism only authoritarianism and were able to break with the USSR without breaking with that strategy. Even more left-wing critiques — such as Poulantzas’s — lack a radical starting point like the one Trotsky’s work can provide and therefore fail to articulate a truly alternative strategic path.

When Historical Materialism once again places the word “strategy” at the center, it does something necessary: strategic debate is the prerequisite for any reconfiguration of the revolutionary socialist project. The question that remains is whether that word will come to denote reflection on revolution in the 21st century. October will not be repeated. This was the premise from which we wrote this book, and it remains so. Its strategic core remains an indispensable starting point. Reconstructing that core for the conditions of the 21st century is the task at hand. That is what this book is about, and that is what it aims to contribute to.

This article originally appeared in Spanish on September 27, 2026 in Ideas de Izquierda.

Notes

↑1	Josep Maria Antentas and Panagiotis Sotiris, eds., “Special Issue on Strategy,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025).
↑2	Josep Maria Antentas, “On Strategy: Thinking with the Military,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025): 130.
↑3	Thomas Waldman, War, Clausewitz and the Trinity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
↑4	Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
↑5	Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party and the Leadership: Why Was the Spanish Proletariat Defeated?,” 1940.
↑6	Panagiotis Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited: Strategic Hypotheses and Open Questions,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025): 55.
↑7	Leon Trotsky, “Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky,” 1920.
↑8	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 34.
↑9	See the prologue of the Spanish-language edition of this book, and chapter 4 of the present edition.
↑10	Stathis Kouvelakis, “Syriza and Socialist Strategy—Part One,” Socialist Worker, March 10, 2015.
↑11	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 34.
↑12	Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xii.
↑13	Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “Trotsky, Gramsci, and the Emergence of the Working Class as Hegemonic Subject,” Left Voice, March 13, 2021.
↑14	Leon Trotsky, “Whither France?,” 1936.
↑15	Trotsky, “Whither France?”
↑16	Trotsky, “Whither France?”
↑17	Letter from Trotsky to Jean Rous, November 13, 1935.
↑18	Claudia Cinatti, “¿Qué partido para qué estrategia?,” Estrategia Internacional, no. 24 (December 2007–January 2008).
↑19	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 49.
↑20	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 38.
↑21	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 49.
↑22	Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2014.), p. 258.
↑23	Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 261.
↑24	See chapter 9.
↑25	Antonio Gramsci, “Encyclopaedic Notions and Cultural Topics: Individual Initiative,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 317.
↑26	Fabio Frosini, La religione dell’uomo moderno: Politica e verità nei Quaderni del carcere di Antonio Gramsci (Rome: Carocci, 2010), 307.
↑27	Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940.
↑28	Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 226.
↑29	Panagiotis, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 55.
↑30	Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008).
↑31	V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” 1915.
↑32	Gramsci, “Caesarism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 221.
↑33	Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1901–2).
↑34	Cf. Freedman, Strategy.
↑35	Cf. Matthew N. Metzel et al., “Winning before the War: A Case for Consolidation of Gains,” Military Review, November–December 2023.
↑36	Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 2016).
↑37	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 59.
↑38	Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 51.
↑39	Article 165 of that constitution granted constitutional status to the workers’ councils at the workplace, district, and national levels. It conferred on them “powers of control and administration in matters within their purview.”
↑40	Leon Trotsky, “A Letter on the Italian Revolution,” 1930.
↑41	Leon Trotsky, “Lessons of October,” 1924.
↑42	Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 264.
↑43	Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 260.
↑44	Raquel Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles (Barcelona: Verso, 2024). Translated to English from the Spanish-language edition.
↑45	Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles, 496.
↑46	Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles, 261.
↑47	A group of officers led by Ernesto Melo Antunes within the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), allied with the Socialist Party and the Church.
↑48	Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles, 504.
↑49	Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles, 218.
↑50	Panagiotis Sotiris, “Perspectives sur le double pouvoir dans la révolution au Portugal, de Nicos Poulantzas à Raquel Varela,” Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, no. 160 (2024): 69–85.
↑51	Varela, Historia popular de la Revolución de los Claveles, 493.
↑52	Leon Trotsky, “Germany, the Key to the International Situation,” 1931.
↑53	Trotsky, “Whither France?”
↑54	On Golden Dawn and the issue of self-defense in the Greek context, see the preface to the first edition of this book.
↑55	Cf. Matías Maiello, De la movilización a la revolución: Debates sobre la perspectiva socialista en el siglo XXI (Buenos Aires: IPS Editions, 2022).
↑56	Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program, 1938.
↑57	Trotsky, Leon, “Lessons of October,” 1924.
↑58	See chapter 2.
↑59	“Theses on Comintern Tactics,” Fourth Congress of the Communist International,” December 5, 1922.
↑60	Antentas, “On Strategy,” 131.
↑61	Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2007).
↑62	Emilio Albamonte and Maiello, Matías, “At the Limits of the ‘Bourgeois Restoration,’” Left Voice, December 24, 2019.
↑63	Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007), 1.
↑64	Cf. Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, Debates y fundamentos sobre la lucha por el socialismo hoy (Buenos Aires: IPS, 2024).
↑65	Antentas, “On Strategy,” 175.
↑66	Clausewitz, On War, 606.
↑67	Gramsci, “Notas breves sobre la política de Maquiavelo” (Q13, §5), in Cuadernos de la cárcel, vol. 5. Ed. José Luis González and trans. Ana María Palos (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1999) 20. Translation ours.
↑68	Part of this reflection draws on a series of talks organized in 2025 by Juan Dal Maso on the contemporary relevance of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, which brought together members of the Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International (CPR-FI) across various countries. See Juan Dal Maso, “En busca de la forma actual de la revolución permanente,” Ideas de Izquierda, March 23, 2025; and Fredy Lizarrague, “Apuntes sobre ‘formas elementales’ y ‘forma actual’ de la revolución permanente,” Ideas de Izquierda, November 2, 2025.
↑69	Panagiotis Sotiris, “Marxism, Strategy, and the Art of War: A Review of Estrategia socialista y arte militar by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello,” Historical Materialism, July 17, 2021.

#Featured

Matías Maiello

Matías is a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (PTS) in Argentina. He is co-author, together with Emilio Albamonte, of the book Estrategia socialista y arte militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2018).

Emilio Albamonte

Emilio is a leading member of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) in Buenos Aires.