[lbo-talk] Avalon Hill's "Class Struggle" boardgame

Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Dec 16 11:26:34 PST 2008



>>> "B."
Charles,

Thanks for that reference. Shamefully, had never heard of "The Role of Force in History" - only knew of the letters written by Marx and mostly Engels, collected here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/subject/war.htm

^^^ Glad to help, B. No shame in not knowing the entire Collected Works of M & E (smile)

I think Engels may have written some encyclopedia articles beyond these letters and the article on the history of force.

I don't know if you know the Joseph Weydemeyer with whom Engels corresponds in a couple of the letters, but he was a professional Prussian artillery officer, fought with the German revolutionaries in 1848, while running a newspaper that had the Marxist line in Germany ! He then became an exile in the US, and was Marx and Engels' "Party representative here", publishing _The Manifesto_ et al, organizing unions, staunch abolitionist in propagandizing the Northern workers, supporting Lincoln's elections. He fought as a major in the US Civil War; was adjutant to the Commander of one of the Western areas in the war. He was among the German "48ers" who were important to the Union victory. A couple of the 48ers were generals in the Union army.

By the way, Engels wrote recommending the strategy for the North in the Civil War that eventually won it ( basically Sherman's thrust cutting the South in "half"; instead of trying to "surround" the whole South , socalled Anaconda I think) _before_ the North actually adopted it. That's in one of the Marx-Engels articles on the Civil War. I'll find it for you, if you want it.

Marx and Engels wrote letters to Lincoln. I wonder if Lincoln was influenced by them. Lincoln had owned a German-language newspaper in Illinois in the 1850's, probably because of the many German '48ers there then, including Wedeymeyer. So, I like to think he probably read _The Manifesto_ as he was in touch with the German-American community, which had lots of Communists of various types. Lincoln has a famous quote on labor as the source of all wealth.

^^^

I'll look into the work you recommended, for sure. Cheers. It sounds like it dovetails pretty well with a line of thought I'm knocking around in my head at the moment re: military science, social science, applied social sciences (like Social Work), and whether military science, like social work, is an applied social science -- thus making warfighting a form of Social Work.

^^^^ CB: I follow your drift, though we might want to call it Anti-Social Work, in the case of war (smile).

^^^

Just as macro-practice social workers make analyses through the lenses of conflict theory or structural functionalist theory, etc., so military science uses guiding warfighting paradigms (what the US Army calls "doctrine"), which are ideological constructs in many ways similar to "grids of intelligibility" Foucault spoke of when he also reversed Clausewitz's dictum and said "Politics is war fought by other means" in _Society Must Be Defended_.

^^^ CB: Lenin added to Clausewitz's aphorism by saying "war is politics by other means. Yeah, other _violent_ means." So, we might say that " politics is war by non-violent means " ? (smile)

Anyway, Yes, Hobbes termed society "the war of all against all " ( bellum omnia contra omnum). Note that in "Waiting for Foucault" ,Sahlins analyzes Foucault as having the same theory as Hobbes. If politics is war, and micro-politics is everywhere, then war is everywhere, roughly speaking.

^^^

The official US Army guiding warfighting paradigms are detailed in Field Manual 100-5. The latest declassified one is from 1993, when I believe the AirLand approach was the guiding doctrine, have supplanted "Maneuver Warfare" from only a decade before, which the Marines explicitly endorsed in their own literature. And "Maneuver Warfare" as a warfighting doctrine was indeed decided through wargaming (see _The Global Wargame_ book by the Newport, Rhode Island's Naval War College, from 1993, which describes the complex wargames these commanders fought out in a big room, and on a board, etc., sounding much like Avalon Hill board gamers from the 1980s), contests of position papers in scholarly journals, sometimes written by civilian "armchair generals" with no military experience but a lot of academic cred, etc., etc.

^^^ CB: I remember my freshman year in college in a poli sci class doing a big simulation of world politics and military strategy as the class project.

To add to the discussion of board games, there's _Risk_, _Stratego_ ( my son wants to play this with me all the time now), and , huh, Chess and Checkers ( smile).

Then economists have abstract "game theory" . Our Andie used to teach it.

^^^

I have Clausewitz's _Principles of War_ but obviously a lot has changed since those days, even if there are some maxims that are memorable or strikingly prescient.

-B.

^^^ CB: Yeah, nuclear weapons changes everything drastically , I would think. Then there is "9/11" tactics.

Well, Clausewitz did use dialectics (smile). First time I'd heard that was in that wikipedia article.

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