No Plan Survives Contact with the Event
Posted by Mike E on September 11, 2010
by Mike Ely
RW Harvey raises a number of important points… including:
“It behooves us to ponder/imagine what “the same way” really constitutes, how elastic it is in the U.S., and what “not in the same way” might involve.”
And I agree with RWH that the “same way” may end up referring to things we don’t expect, and may involve demands for changes we didn’t anticipate.
RWHarvey also wrote:
“what we theorize today will not, I repeat, will not look anything like what a revolutionary situation will present.”
I think this is true… and has repeatedly been true in the past. But I think there is an analogy to planning before a battle:
All military science points to a paradox: No plan survives contact with the enemy, and yet victory is often dependent on the quality of your planning.
You need a logistical plan, and you need to implement it to gather logistical supplies. You need a plan for deploying your forces. You need a tactical plan. etc. But then, once any major battle starts, the combatants discover that important details are unanticipated. Things often spin out in ways that no one expected. That’s why intelligence leading up to a battle is so important, and why command and control is so important in the battle– and that’s part of why why warfare is both science and art.
You needed that series of plans based on your best guess of the coming situation. And you needed to align forces and resource based on those plans. And THEN the colliding commanders need to adjust EVERYTHING rapidly as the new situation unfolds in the concrete.
RWHarvey writes:
“Theoretical demarcation and grounding? Excellent. But if this inhibits apriori the ability to respond to and lead in an emerging, rapidly changing situation, then what is the point?”
I don’t think that theory need inherently lock us into verdicts and patterns. But we do need to fight for a flexible mind, a truly dialectical method, and a criticial and self-critical theory. And all of that is part of our theoretical process — developing a theoretical method that does not operate as a series of blinders.
And, further, we need an analysis and we need to act on the analysis — even if it ends up being “wrong” in this-or-that aspect.
(Lenin’s major 1905 analysis of a coming Russian revolution, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” proved to have major problems as the real-world alignments emerged.)
To return to the military analogy for a second: No one should use the unpredictable nature of a coming battle as an excuse NOT to formulate detailed logistical and tactical plans. Any force that did that would always suffer defeat. And that is part of why irregular forces (mobs or local militia) are almost always beaten by regular forces.
Acting on such plans is part of seizing the initiative — which is crucial to victory. And (not surprisingly) much hangs in the degree to which plans foreshadow reality — even if not perfectly.
An “oops” example: When different left forces sent cadre to “salt” the coalfields at the end of the 1960s, some NCM parties assumed that the cutting edge would be in areas where the miners were still unionizing (i.e. Kentucky and Harlan County)… so they sent their cadre there. In fact, this was exactly wrong: the struggle became most intense in the most highly unionized coalfields of southern West Virginia (where the RU/RCP had sent their forces in 1972). That is why the movie “Harlan County” (made in 1976) starts focused on the unionization struggle of one small mine in Kentucky, but suddenly veers and “discovers” the much more significant and illegal struggles of tens of thousands happening next door in the central unionized coalfields. Other left parties ended up moving their people from Kentucky to West Virginia, after the first massive wildcats had come and gone. It was an example of diverse forces making very different predictive analyses about the nature of the class struggle and its likely points of eruption (based on different ideological and political lines).
And to bring the military analogy back to politics: This is why we revolutionaries need perceptive analysis and creative preparation now, and we also need brilliant innovation as things unfold. Anyone who limited to non-revolutionary work during non-revolutionary times will simply be lost when something else becomes possible.
* * * * * * * *
In reply to this essay, RW Harvey wrote:
“I wonder what people even think might possibly happen when a revolutionary situation thrusts itself upon the U.S.? At the risk of being charged ahistorical (or worse, exceptionalist), Russia 1917, China 1949, and Cuba 1959 will be of no use to wrapping our heads around what we will face.
“There will be no Winter Palace to storm, no Sierras from which to make forays, and no regular “Red Army” to take the field (except perhaps in the final phases, if we are victorious). Perhaps we had better study the conditions within failed states, or present-day Iraq to better represent what we may be facing. Seizing/controlling D.C. or N.Y.C. will unlikely mean the entire edifice will fall into our hands.
“Historical analogies are helpful when they truly are analagous; dreams and fantasies must be measured against some semblance of reality… “
TNL responded:
“History isn’t only valuable when it offers analogies.
“Russia, China and Cuba have much to teach us not because a revolutionary situation in the US will follow any of those patterns but because, along with other revolutionary experiences, they reveal persistent common problems as well as underline the need of every revolution to innovate.
“Each of those revolutions, for example, had to deal with the problem of developing its own military capacity. The specific conditions and solutions varied considerably, but its a good bet that any revolution in the US will confront a similar sort of problem, though of course involving very different scales and military technologies.
“Studying historical experiences helps us appreciate the sorts of problems that might be thrown up and the range of responses to similar problems. This gives us a departure point for asking how such problems would look in a revolutionary situation in the 21st century United States. Imagining such scenarios in turn helps us begin to formulate plans which, as Mike has pointed out, are both crucial and likely to fall apart in a real revolutionary situation.”
carldavidson said
All this is fine, and I agree with almost all of it.
Yet, to repeat myself from other threads, we have enormous problems in front of our noses.
–Eighty eight percent of the working class have no unions or self-defense organizations.
–The majority of them vote Democratic, with little independent organization to change that condition.
–The Black community suffers from serious lack of organization, save for churches and the gangs of the ‘underground’ economy.
–Soldiers are suffering from multiple deployments in unjust wars, yet their organization are still to small.
–One out of five workers are unemployed or underemployed, yet, save for JwJ in a few key cities, we have no unemployed councils.
Just pick any one of them, get some practice going, use the mass line, and raise it to the level of broader plans, policies and theories. Then we can talk more seriously.
RW Harvey said
The combination of Mike’s posting and Stephanie’s posting provide an excellent synthesis as to where we find ourselves in the “primordial soup.”
With that in mind, everything Carl lists in his comment has the potential to be a “faultline” (in terms of Mike’s definition), yet they are not in and of themselves such. Any person withn those struggles could do organizing (and probably are; oppression and injustice seems to breed some form of resistance). These are even portents of struggles that might precede “not in the same way” and could certainly be part of the Iskra/Pravda edges to revolutionary work.
Lastly, it might be good, as TNL indicates, to analyse certain revolutions to actually see if they offer practical analogies/perspectives; my guess is that the outcome of such analysis will be to further realize that other than very generalized frameworks (e.g., “revolutionary forces always have to struggle to establish military capacity”), they will give us nothing substantial to sink our teeth into. Best we leave the romance behind and imagine — deeply, fantastically, poetically — scenarios that we might confront so that when the inevitable “falling apart” of our best-laid plans occurs we are not looking at maps wondering where the Winter Palace is and instead are flexible enough to adapt and lead.