Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 1
On War
Michael Howard, translator of
Clausewitz’ work, and author of “Clausewitz”, opens his
Introduction with a quote from one Bernard Brodie, about Clausewitz: “His is not simply the greatest, but the
only great book about war;” and Howard records his own agreement with this
assessment.
If you can get it, Howard’s
book helps readers a lot towards understand Clausewitz’ “On War” (Chapter 1, the
summarising chapter, is attached) but in one respect Howard appears to be
mistaken.
After describing Clausewitz’
“dialectic” (e.g. the relationship between physical and moral forces; between
historical knowledge and critical judgement; between idea and manifestation;
between “absolute” and “real” war; between attack and defence; and between ends
and means) Howard writes: “The dialectic
was not Hegelian: it led to no synthesis which itself conjured up its
antithesis. Rather it was a continuous interaction between two poles, each
fully comprehensible only in terms of the other.”
But it would seem to be
perfectly Hegelian to conceive of such
a unity and struggle of opposites; and as to whether Clausewitz’s dialectic
lacked a forward dynamic, or not, is something that can be settled at once by
reading only a few pages. Whereupon it will be found that Clausewitz is surely
one of the most dynamic authors ever.
Clausewitz was ten years
younger than Hegel. He died only two days after Hegel, on 16 November 1831.
They were both victims of the same cholera epidemic.
Since Hegel’s was the
official philosophy of Prussia, and Clausewitz was in charge of the Prussian
War College in Berlin for twelve years, while Hegel was Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Berlin, it is impossible to believe that Clausewitz was
not familiar with Hegel’s then highly fashionable ideas.
These were the same Hegelian
ideas that seized the imagination of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (both of
whom spent time in Berlin during the late 1830s to early 1840s) and upon which
their thinking relied for the rest of their lives. Clausewitz and Marxism are
not far apart, neither in their pedigree, nor in the philosophical structure of
their thinking.
Much is made, in the
commentaries on Antonio Gramsci’s 20th-century writings, of the contrast
between wars of manoeuvre and of position. But the military breakthrough of
Clausewitz’s lifetime was the French revolutionary campaign against its
neighbours, including Prussia, which had rendered obsolete, already in the
1790s, the ancient military alternatives of march and siege which were the
limits of Gramsci's military analogies, still, in the 1930s.
Although a servant of the
Prussian crown, what Clausewitz described was warfare in the age of mass democracy.
As one who had fought against Napoleon Bonaparte, Clausewitz had understood
Napoleon’s warfare as well as, or better than, anyone else.
Clausewitz defined strategy
and tactics as “the linking together of separate battle engagements into a
single whole, for the final object of the war.” To define strategy in this way,
as end, and tactics as means, was a profound contribution for which we in South
Africa owe a debt to Clausewitz.
Equally as profound is the
complex of thinking around Clausewitz’ well-known understanding of war as an
extension of politics, by other means.
Not only does this mean that
war is always and everywhere subordinate to politics; but it also means that
war (the breakdown of negotiation and the resort to force) must, and can only,
return the parties to the negotiating table. War is an interlude of brutality
between negotiations. This was Clausewitz’s most famous insight.
To sum up: The world of 1848,
when the Communist Manifesto
was first published, was already charged up with historical potential by great
preceding events, first and foremost among them the Great French Revolution, with
the Napoleonic Wars that followed it; and also by great thinkers and writers,
foremost among them GWF Hegel and Carl von Clausewitz, whose
insights will assist us to understand the place of violence in the history of
revolution.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: On War, Chapter 1, What is War?, 1827,
Clausewitz.
