Contributi allo studio della questione militare in Marx Engels Lenin Tukhachevskij

“Although they were settled in England by the 1860s, Marx and Engels cannot fail to have been influenced by the build-up of the Prussian/German Army under Bismarck and the Elder Moltke, and by the three successful wars which culminated in the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. They also studied Clausewitz and, unsurprisingly, caught his drift correctly. For although Clausewitz’s work was spurned by the Prussian General Staff, there was at this stage still a certain parallelism if not convergence between the two at the philosophical level. It is neither easy nor within the scope of this book to distinguish the particular contributions of Marx and Engels to a given aspect of their philosophy. Broadly, though, Marx would appear to have stated the principle that the causes of war were always economic, while Engels concerned himself more closely with the nature and conduct of war. Be that as it may, Marxism embraces the Clausewitzian concept of “absolute war”, which ‘mutatis mutandis’ comes close to the 20th century concept of “total war”, while seeing the ability to wage war ‘solely in terms of economic resources and industrial capacity’. While Lenin, to some extent with the advantage of hindsight, qualified this point of view, Tukhachevskij bases his writing on the future wars pretty firmly on Engels. He seems to have been deeply, perhaps excessively, impressed by (as brought out above) the economic and logistic miscalculations of Western Europe in the First World War, by (as he saw it) the fact that “the best army lost” that war, by the woeful state of Tsarist Russia’s war industry, by the strategic and operational limitations imposed by lack of resources on the conduct of the Civil War, and by the comparative backwardness of much of Soviet industry in the early 1920s” [Richard Simpkin, Deep Battle. The Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii, 2012]