Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle

How about this similar take?

1. Strategy: general plans of action and expected outcomes grounded in a theory of the social structure.

2. Tactics: methods used to advance a strategy, that take historical contingency into account.

FWIW, Clausewitz defined strategy as "the art of the employment of battles as a means to gain the object of war". For Clausewitz the difference between strategy and tactics was basically the level of abstraction. Strategy is large scale, while tactics are the local methods via which the strategy is implemented.

Example: U.S. strategy in the Pacific in WWII was to advance from island chain to island chain, not by attacking and occupying each island, but rather the minimum necessary to establish control of the surrounding air and sea. This was a great surprise to the Japanese strategists, who had anticipated that the Americans would incur huge losses rooting them out of every last occupied island. Nimitz reckoned that it wasn't necessary to take them all. This was really brilliant.

U.S. tactics were to concentrate the greatest firepower possible on the smallest area of real estate. Massed naval gunfire, massed air bombardment, massed ground assault. On the whole these tactics were incompetent, putting too many men into positions of great vulnerability facing well-dug-in enemy positions which were far less smithereenized by the bombardments than anticipated.

Another example: Bin Laden's strategy was to lure U.S. ground forces into the role of occupiers, triggering, he hoped, a massive regional upsurge in militant resistance. Seems to have worked. The tactics have been roadside bombings, suicide bombings, and the other trappings of "asymmetrical warfare."

Does this help? Dunno!

Another important point, I think: the chief distinction between Marx's approach to politics and the varieties of utopian socialism (and anarchism) that existed in his time concerned the latter's failure to formulate a coherent strategy for socio-political transformation. This remains as true today as it was 150 years ago.

For example, millions of people were deeply emotionally affected by MLK's vision of an egalitarian "promised land," but the challenge for the U.S. civil rights movements was not--and is not--just to formulate a vision of a more just society but also how to mobilize people to move a little closer toward that dream!

It might also be useful to talk about the difference between strategy, tactics, and practices.

I'm thinking of the TI-inspired group we once upon a time graced with our presence. Did we have a strategy? Most of us had rejected the "build it and they will come" approach of the sectarian past, meaning, draft the perfect program and wait for the revolution. That was a strategy, albeit an incompetent one. What took its place? I'm not sure, but I'm tempted to say we had a practice instead of a strategy. In fact for the most part a pretty healthy practice of nonsectarian movement-building. Is it reasonable to say that we substituted practice for strategy? That seems pretty right to me.

I suppose most left groups have at least spontaneous strategies to orient their political practice. Usually this amounts to little more than a day-to-day, pragmatic, "let's see what crisis happens next" perspective. This would still be preferable, though, to a genuine sect's inflexible reliance on strategy lifted from a 1917 (or 1968) conjuncture!