Friedrich Engels and the Strategy of “Siege Warfare”

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.”

KEYWORDS:

• Engels
• revolution
• strategy and tactics
• siege warfare

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Daniel Egan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA. His research interests are Marxist theory, war and militarism. He is the author of The Dialectic of Position and Maneuver: Understanding Gramsci’s Military Metaphor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

Notes

1 At the same time, Engels recognized the relatively autonomous nature of the social laws of warfare; that is, in the context of a particular mode of production, they make their own structurally defined contribution to the organization and outcomes of war in specific social formations. This is most clearly illustrated by the importance Engels gave to military leadership. Strong military leadership, Engels noted, can overcome to a considerable degree material disadvantages in military forces. Engels was particularly impressed, for example, with the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Józef Bem in the national liberation struggles of Italy and Hungary respectively. Similarly, poor military leadership—such as that of Louis Bonaparte, “the pretended heir to a great military tradition” (Engels 1980g, 606) or of the Union army early in the US Civil War, which Engels criticized for its “complete want of talent. One general more stupid than the other” (Engels 1985a, 387)—can negate to a considerable degree material advantages in military forces.

2 Making a connection between the imperialist state’s brutal suppression of resistance in the colonies and that at home, Engels noted to Paul Lafargue:

You will have seen the reports in the papers of the ghastly effects, in Dahomey, of the new projectiles [referring to French use of artillery with melinite (picric acid)]. A young Viennese doctor who has just arrived here (ex-assistant to Nothnagel) saw the wounds made by the Austrian projectiles in the Nurmitz strike, and he tells us the same thing. There’s no doubt that people in danger of being shot to bits in this manner will want to know why. It’s a capital thing for maintaining peace, but also for curbing the so-called revolutionary inclinations, on whose outbursts our governments count. (Engels 1989k, 21)

3 Engels made a similar point in a letter to Karl Kautsky in 1893 critical of those calling for the use of the general strike as a political weapon:

for heaven’s sake let us avoid taking any step that might tempt the working men, who are in any case impatient and thirsting for action, to stake their all on one card—and, what’s more, at a time when the government wants this and could use provocation to bring it about. (Engels 1989g, 226)

4 See de Vauban (1968). For a detailed discussion of de Vauban’s influence in the history of military fortifications, see Duffy (1985).

5 The relatively speedy capture of the Russian fortress at Bomarsund in August 1854 by British and French forces presents an interesting counterexample. In that instance, British and French forces took the fortress by storm after one week, but this was due, in Engels’s opinion, more to the fortress’s poor construction than to the qualities of British or French military leadership:

The granite walls of Bomarsund turned out mere Russian humbug—heaps of rubbish kept in shape by thin stone-facings, not fit to resist a good and steady fire for any time. If Nicholas had been cheated by their constructors, he has succeeded for all that in cheating the allies out of a whole campaign by these sham fortresses. (Engels 1980d, 385–386)

The fortress was, Engels concluded, “taken by assault almost without the honor of an open trench” (Engels 1980c, 382).