In the text The 36 Stratagems this is called Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul (借屍還魂, Jiè shī huán hún)
Take an institution, a technology, a method, or even an ideology that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one's own purposes.

Examples of this range from outdated eastern bloc radar picking up stealth bombers to black blocs bringing back drum lines for communication and morale.

The 36 Stratagems is a sort of folk counterpart to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War that has less to do with the virtue of generals and more to do with cunning ploys and phrases that help generate cunning praxis.

To read go to content section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems

If you watched Biden’s inauguration you may have noticed the red-coated flute players dressed in colonial attire. These are a recreation of the musicians that would play on the battlefield during the American Revolutionary War. They dressed brightly so they could be seen and on top of morale boosting they also signaled communications for maneuvers.

This style of on the field soldier musician has mostly died out and such musicians are reserved for parades, but in the 90s and 00s groups like the Infernal Noise Brigade replicated this tactic along side the black bloc at summit protests.

Morale patches can look cool, but do you really want to be more distinctive?

Deceiving the Sky also has a section on the 36 Strategies where they also discuss the game Go as an operational thinking figure.

A PDF for Deceiving the Sky can be found here:

Deceiving the Sky: Collective Experiments in Strategic Thinking

Go is a game that presents a large finitude of moves that suffice at replicating the large finitude of options in life and thus produce the same creative anxiety one has to fight through. Of course it has its limits in replication, but it also provides a thinking figure for the strength of formation shapes, lines of logistics, envelopment, and so on. It is considered a valuable thinking tool by ancient and cutting edge strategists.

Further reading on Go

Go as it relates to Mao’s protracted guerrilla war: https://senseis.xmp.net/?TheProtractedGame

Go as it relates to the 36 Stratagems: https://senseis.xmp.net/?TheThirtySixStratagemsAppliedToGo

What is operational thinking?

Operational thinking exists at the intersection of strategy and tactics. Operational thinking is also rooted in practice, in the operation as it comes into contact with reality.

Where tactics involve the immanent, are about smaller concrete actions, and often in a moment, strategy sees the big picture and over arching goals. Both are technically impossible to master. You can never totally make sense of chaotic unfolding situations just as there are always too many fundamental existential problems to generalize a grand strategy. This is why operational thinking is needed. To use strategic and tactical thinking in combination only to the extent that you maintain your operational efficacy.

No strategy survives first contact with reality, strategy must in part be emergent. Tactics can be successful in a moment, but without some grasp of a bigger picture you can be susceptible to higher lever manipulated or head towards a dead end. However, over-thinking any of this can also lead to paralysis and indecision that guarantees defeat.

The trick is to balance the courage needed to leap into action with the wisdom of how to act effectively. How to overcome the trembling anxiety that comes with creativity and free movement while also fighting smart and thus fighting well.

As Siddartha is alleged to have said to a pupil while watching a musician float by on the river, “if you pull a string too tight it snaps and if there’s too much slack it doesn’t play.”

In short, we intend to play some beautiful music.

“It is easy to hit a bird flying in a straight line.”
—B. Gracian

Snowball Fights as Revolutionary Practice

Footage of Russian protesters pelting riot cops with snow is making the rounds on here. A letter to Crimethinc points out: “One exciting emergent tactic has been snowball attacks on the police that have fostered confidence and maintained tension while also being an escalation people are comfortable with. If the point of an insurgency is to humiliate the authorities and motivate other partisans to take action, this is certainly a way to do so. In one video circulating on Telegram, you can even see a snowball attack escalating into an attack on a vehicle with a state license plate [reportedly, a vehicle potentially associated with the FSB, the hated Russian the Russian Federal Security Service]. We have seen revolt begin to bloom in these tactics, but, on the other hand, repression has come too.”

The Boston Massacre is a worst case scenario when it comes to snowball fights with the forces of order. The projectiles thrown by the crowd that day in 1770 were matched with musket fire resulting in five killed by British soldiers. Among the dead was a Black and Indigenous man named, Crispus Attucks. However, even the racist smears by Crown loyalists weren’t able to prevent this massacre from becoming an evident and grievous wound that is alleged to have turned a critical mass of people against King George III and British Parliamentary authority. So what lesson is here? Repression of such soft attacks can backfire.

Stories can be operational thinking aids.

An example:

One night I see a drunkard hunched over, looking on the ground, under the light of a street lamp.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“My keys.”

“Where did you lose them?”

“Over there,” he says as he points in a direction away from where we’re standing

“Then why are you looking here?”

“It’s where the light is.”

//

What does this help us remember? Well that what we’re looking for isn’t always where the light is. That is to say it isn’t where it’s easiest to get information from. Whether it’s historical research needing to move beyond Google searches or knowing actually going to the woods to observe militia activity that won’t register on social media, sometimes you need to make some effortful intentional moves to get to where what you want is located.

Encouraging nothing but vigilance, who is more dangerous, the person who identifies themselves as a commander of a known organization in a video and acts macho and makes threats or the person that only appears in unremarkable clothes in grainy footage before a devastating attack?

There are of course limits to the power of the clandestine. Sometimes showing your face can garner more popular support like in eviction or land struggles tied to tribes or families. Anti-repression cases can get a boost putting a face and a name to them. Everything is situational.

We’ve had the honor of being put on some wingnat’s report list do to our critical outlook on the ruling order. We have some words we’d like to share on this occasion.

The regime of the censor always fails in the end. It is pitifully weak compared to joy-affected eruptions. Reactionaries are the embodiment of the regime par excellence. They are spectacular failures in this regard. Of course certain activist milieus have adopted this as well. But what eruptions have we seen recent and what have been the result? Who is still chugging along? Who spread like wildfire and even across national boundaries? The reaction’s tantrums are their swan songs.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t take them seriously, that we shouldn’t stop them from operating effectively, but that we should realize we have a strength they don’t in our biopower. The reaction is an obstacle we must render inert on our way to more powerful goals. They can’t play the jazz of insurrection as well as a radically liberatory movement can. It is only in the creative chaos of anonymous collective image boards that they managed to make anything of worth in the contemporary. In the end they don’t have the same potential thriving contagiousness across differences even in their most viral forms. They are trapped by their exclusive identitarianism even though they have excelled at coalition building in certain cases, need we say more than Unite the Right?

All the benefits of having formal and informal institutions of domination on their side weren’t remotely enough in the face of last Summer’s insurrection.

Spring is coming and neither the reaction nor the state can stop it.

“Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?” —Lao Tzu

There is much to praise in those who see an opening and rush into the chaos to strike and it has been said that waiting only teaches how to wait. But what of the patience of the hunter?