ilchinealach reviewed Military Writings. by Leon Trotsky
Review of 'Military Writings.' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
trotsky at his most trotsky; denouncing some article a guy wrote for 200 pages.
the article in question was written by konstantin simonov, who seems to have been representing a broader swathe of opinion within the soviet military by calling for the formulation and implementation of a single coherent military doctrine that could be both proletarian and revolutionary in nature, to develop education in the army and to expand the worker's state beyond its borders. trotsky rejects the dichotomy simonov establishes between counter-revolutionary states with positionist doctrines / revolutionary states with maneuverist doctrines, underlining the need to be clear in explaining to the working class and peasantry just how dire the global situation is and why expecting them to become a highly trained highly disciplined guerilla army in the position to establish new states in Europe by conscripting and educating them is naive in the extreme.
i document all this …
trotsky at his most trotsky; denouncing some article a guy wrote for 200 pages.
the article in question was written by konstantin simonov, who seems to have been representing a broader swathe of opinion within the soviet military by calling for the formulation and implementation of a single coherent military doctrine that could be both proletarian and revolutionary in nature, to develop education in the army and to expand the worker's state beyond its borders. trotsky rejects the dichotomy simonov establishes between counter-revolutionary states with positionist doctrines / revolutionary states with maneuverist doctrines, underlining the need to be clear in explaining to the working class and peasantry just how dire the global situation is and why expecting them to become a highly trained highly disciplined guerilla army in the position to establish new states in Europe by conscripting and educating them is naive in the extreme.
i document all this because there's a lot in simonov's argument that you could map onto theories such as protracted people's war or focoism and in trotsky's argument that pragmatism is the only constant in military affairs, that winning a war is not a science / there are not inveterately Marxist ways of doing it, we get a substantial challenge to some of its core ideas that go beyond moralising or pacifist ones
surprised he didn't have much to say on how world war I marked a turning point in the history of warfare; like a lot of contemporary Marxist literature on this stuff the focus is on the Napoleonic wars. I wonder if that paradigm shift wasn't as visible at the time trotsky was writing