Tactics always serve the strategy. Tactics are for winning battles. On the other hand, strategy is for winning the war.
While this approach is commonly associated with the military, this is also applied in many other concerns like business, pursuing a woman, or waging a revolution. Stripped down to its bare nature it is a methodology that has no morals of its own. It is the users with their ultimate goals who define them.
In the economy, the traditional law of supply and demand remains gobbledygook to ordinary consumers. What they see is the strategy for continuous profit no matter how depressed the buying power of the masses is. The tactics of penalizing labor for profitability are justified for survival and stability.
Pursuing a woman is a serious business for men with its own law of supply and demand more complicated than that of goods and services. It is because the heart is more involved.
It is never in the number of choices but in the one that the heart stubbornly desires. While tactically winning bases of favor will suffice for flitting moments of joy it is winning the woman’s heart that gives the strategy forever bliss.
Now comes the pursuit of revolution. Like in business, there must be a plan to achieve the desired revolutionary change. How “revolutionary” the desired change is will depend on the ideology. The strategy and tactics to be employed merely follow.
The so-called EDSA People Power Revolution was satisfied by the fall of the Marcos regime and the real change only happened in the minds of the people who either rejoiced in the change of government or grudgingly accepted it.
With no recognized ideology leading it, it was more of a convergence of developments that various interests tried to exploit for 30 years and more.
A new Constitution was enforced starting from a revolutionary government, but nothing was really “revolutionized” except perhaps some principles and policies of the state that remain to be fully substantiated until now like freedom from poverty.
If the strategy was the pursuit of the vision of the new Constitution through its provisions, the succeeding administrations after its adoption should have been the tactics. Without unity of thought, like an ideology, strategy and tactics became just the exclusive domain of politicians in their turfs.
An ideology defines the morals of strategy and tactics of political parties. The Communist Party of the Philippines adheres to one, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Following the ideology, the CPP is leading an armed struggle, moving from the countryside to the cities, not simply to gain some political foothold but to engage in a “continuing revolution” that at present offers no foreseeable end.
The tactics employed that can sacrifice young Filipino lives in combat or endanger the same in support activities are necessary steps towards the strategic goal. Senseless as it may seem to us, but not to the CPP.
This leads us back to pursuing a woman. The most important thing is to win the heart, this time the heart of the people to realize a lasting bliss.
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