On Strategy and Tactics

The Oxford Dictionary defines strategy as:

1 a plan designed to achieve a particular long-term aim.

2 the art of planning and directing military activity in a war or battle.

It defines Tactics as:

An action or strategy planned to achieve a specific end.

Strategy becomes the object which can be achieved by implying various tactics. Tactics is a part of strategy which can imply various means to achieve the goals set.

Strategy is set having our long term goals in mind while tactics is a part of day to day affairs that changes according to the objective and subjective condition prevailing.

Hence for a time strategy becomes the end and tactics the means to achieve it.

For a principled movement like Marxism –Leninism, both the nature and the constitution of strategy and tactics plays a key role.

Com HK you Said
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Strategy:
Defense of democratic rights as a prerequisite to
prevention/delaying /sabotaging the fascist corporate state.

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It is pertinent to analyze whether the tactics being employed will help further the movement to achieve its goal or not. If not then the tactics becomes worthless piece of earth or may even become counter-productive.

Comrade you further said

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The defense of democratic norms and rights is both a matter of strategy but
also of tactics.
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It is vital for the communists to understand the modus of their tactics. If a revolutionary communist party or group employs populist tactics with sole agenda being to woo the masses towards it while ignoring the political consciousness of the masses then this tactics is inherently flawed and negates the very of the principles of Marxism Leninism.

The United Front tactics is to be adopted only in the circumstances where the Revolutionary party/group is in position of dictating and propagating its own ideas.

In case of U.F. policy being adopted by the Communists while in minority has always proved to be counter productive for the movement per say. For e.g. Immediately after the independence the CPI’s tactics to infiltrate the Congress (INC), to wean away the revolutionary section of the INC into ML movement turned out to be a fiasco. With the CPI; losing some of its best cadre to INC.

Similarly the Communists attempt to change the British Labour Party into a ML formation has been nothing more than a utopia. Today the communist have lost whatever strength they had and presently they are not more than a motley group of people on the fringe divided into numerous groups with no capability to intervene in the national/Local politics. More than communists it is the anarchist/ single agenda groups who are at the fore front of resistance movement being waged against the forces of Capitalism.

Hence what you said: By engaging against injustice on a PRINCIPLED basis (that means critiquing random individual terrorist violence at the same time) - engages the highest
levels of the politically aware, and leads to a chance of moving them to ML-ism.

In reality has not borne the desired fruit.

The failure of the United Front tactics can be attributed to the fact that without properly elevating the political consciousness of masses and wooing them on some populist slogan may win some support to the movement, but the masses attracted would be nothing more than a flock of disgruntled elements that cannot constitute a revolutionary army. Such people who join the party for fulfillment of some immediate demand in case of both fulfillment and non fulfillment would disassociate themselves from the revolutionary activity. Only people with high level of political and class consciousness could be expected to remain with the ML movement till the realization of the goals.

If the revolutionary’s think that by supporting Human rights they will be able to wean some support – they are day dreaming, they are enmeshed in a web of their own convoluted thinking.

The present tactics should be to oppose such sentence at the same time exposing the real face of the capitalist state. And making the masses realize that the way out is striving for a socialist revolution leading to the formation of a socialist state.

The tactics should be to oppose such injustice but the tactics should not be the end itself. Rather only a method to expose the present exploitative nature of the state, with an aim of elevating the consciousness of the masses—this should be the strategy of the present time.