Friedrich Engels and the Strategy of “Siege Warfare”

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a March 1887 letter to Hermann Schluter, a prominent member of the German-speaking socialist movement in the United States, Friedrich Engels argued that the appropriate strategy for the German social democracy of the time was “a form of siege warfare.” In doing so he anticipated Karl Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition” and Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position” in the application of the specific metaphor of siege warfare to revolutionary strategy. Given the prominent role played by Engels in the development of a Marxist analysis of war, this metaphor is more than a simple stylistic flourish. Among Engels’s extensive writings on war and military matters are his observations on sieges in wars of the nineteenth century, including the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. In this paper I examine how Engels’s military writings on siege warfare can help us to understand his discussion of revolutionary strategy. Engels’s sophisticated military perspective served as the foundation for a dialectical understanding of revolutionary strategy that provides an antidote to the contemporary tendency toward a stagist understanding of “strategy of attrition—strategy of overthrow” and “war of position—war of maneuver.”