Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: Knowing Thyself and Knowing the Enemy
As to the war and the resources of either party, a detailed comparison will not show you the inferiority of Athens. Personally engaged in the cultivation of their land, without funds either private or public, the Peloponnesians are also without experience in long wars across sea, from the strict limit which poverty imposes on their attacks upon each other. Powers of this description are quite incapable of often manning a fleet or often sending out an army: they cannot afford the absence from their homes, the expenditure from their own funds; and besides, they have not command of the sea. Capital, it must be remembered, maintains a war more than forced contributions. Farmers are a class of men that are always more ready to serve in person than in purse. Confident that the former will survive the dangers, they are by no means so sure that the latter will not be prematurely exhausted, especially if the war last longer than they expect, which it very likely will. In a single battle the Peloponnesians and their allies may be able to defy all Hellas, but they are incapacitated from carrying on a war against a power different in character from their own, by the want of the single council-chamber requisite to prompt and vigorous action, and the substitution of a diet composed of various races, in which every state possesses an equal vote, and each presses its own ends, a condition of things which generally results in no action at all. The great wish of some is to avenge themselves on some particular enemy, the great wish of others to save their own pocket. Slow in assembling, they devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile each fancies that no harm will come of his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays. (1:141:2-7)
The contrast between Achidamus and Pericles is stark because while the latter takes a more comprehensive view of the strengths and weaknesses of his side while the former dwells on the strengths alone. I wish to draw on an example relevant to my own work to show what how these different styles of analysis worked elsewhere.
Mao Zedong is rightly credited as being one of the most effective insurgents in modern history. The ability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to withstand assaults from the Japanese military in Northern and Central China during the Second World War (1937-1945) and its subsequent victory over the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang, KMT) demonstrated the wisdom of Mao’s strategic and political approach to revolutionary guerrilla warfare. The CCP’s post-1937 successes were in stark contrast to its complete defeat in Southern China, where between 1927 and 1934 it led an insurgency against the KMT.
The CCP’s failure in Southern China was a product of the overconfidence of the CCP’s leadership in its political and strategic position vis-à-vis the KMT. The CCP saw rural Chinese society as consisting of five socio-economic classes: (1) landlords, (2) rich peasants, (3) middle peasants, (4) poor peasants, and (5) rural laborers. Poor peasants were the numerical majority in the countryside and the CCP-established regime in Southern China, called the Chinese Soviet Republic, was established on a foundation of poor peasants and rural laborers. The CCP leadership believed that their allies in the countryside far outnumbered their enemies and that the force of their numbers and their zeal for revolution would be sufficient overcome the resistance of the KMT.
In 1925, Mao surveyed the fabric of Chinese society and asked: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”
All those in league with imperialism – the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, and the reactionary intellectual class, that is, the so-called big bourgeoisie in China – are our enemies, our true enemies. All the petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, and the proletariat are our friends, our true friends. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, its right wing must be considered our enemy; even if it is not yet our enemy, it will soon become so. Its left wing may be considered as our friend – but not as our true friend, and we must be constantly on our guard against it. How many are our true friends? There are 395 million of them. How many are our true enemies? There are one million of them. How many are there of these people in the middle who may either be our friends or our enemies? There are four million of them. Even if we consider these four million as enemies, this only adds up to a bloc of barely five million, and a sneeze from the 395 million would certainly suffice to blow them down. [2]
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