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> What is Terrorism?> Why Marxists oppose Individual
Terrorism
WHAT IS TERRORISM?
Why Marxists oppose Individual
Terrorism
Leon Trotsky, 1909
Our class enemies are in the habit of
complaining about our terrorism. What they mean by this
is rather unclear. They would like to label all the
activities of the proletariat directed against the class
enemy's interests as terrorism. The strike, in their
eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of
a strike, the organisation of strike pickets, an economic
boycott of a slave-driving boss, a moral boycott of a
traitor from our own ranks - all this and much more they
call terrorism.
If terrorism is understood in this way as
any action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the
enemy, then of course the entire class struggle is
nothing but terrorism. And the only question remaining is
whether the bourgeois politicians have the right to pour
out their flood of moral indignation about proletarian
terrorism when their entire state apparatus with its
laws, police and army is nothing but an apparatus for
capitalist terror!
However, it must be said that when they reproach us with
terrorism, they are trying - although not always
consciously - to give the word a narrower, less indirect
meaning. The damaging of machines by workers, for
example, is terrorism in this strict sense of the word.
The killing of an employer, a threat to set fire to a
factory or a death threat to its owner, an assassination
attempt, with revolver in hand, against a government
minister - all these are terrorist acts in the full and
authentic sense. However, anyone who has an idea of the
true nature of international Social Democracy ought to
know that it has always opposed this kind of terrorism
and does so in the most irreconcilable way.
Why?
'Terrorising' with the threat of a strike, or actually
conducting a strike is something only industrial workers
can do. The social significance of a strike depends
directly upon first, the size of the enterprise or the
branch of industry that it affects, and second, the
degree to which the workers taking part in it are
organised, disciplined, and ready for action. This is
just as true of a political strike as it is for an
economic one. It continues to be the method of struggle
that flows directly from the productive role of the
proletariat in modern society.
Belittles the role of the masses
In order to develop, the capitalist
system needs a parliamentary superstructure. But because
it cannot confine the modern proletariat to a political
ghetto, it must sooner or later allow the workers to
participate in parliament. In elections, the mass
character of the proletariat and its level of political
development - quantities which, again, are determined by
its social role, i.e. above all, its productive role -
find their expression.
As in a strike, so in elections the method, aim, and
result of the struggle always depend on the social role
and strength of the proletariat as a class. Only the
workers can conduct a strike. Artisans ruined by the
factory, peasants whose water the factory is poisoning,
or lumpen proletarians in search of plunder can smash
machines, set fire to a factory, or murder its owner.
Only the conscious and organised working class can send a
strong representation into the halls of parliament to
look out for proletarian interests. However, in order to
murder a prominent official you need not have the
organised masses behind you. The recipe for explosives is
accessible to all, and a Browning can be obtained
anywhere. In the first case, there is a social struggle,
whose methods and means flow necessarily from the nature
of the prevailing social order; and in the second, a
purely mechanical reaction identical anywhere - in China
as in France - very striking in its outward form (murder,
explosions and so forth) but absolutely harmless as far
as the social system goes.
A strike, even of modest size, has social consequences:
strengthening of the workers' self-confidence, growth of
the trade union, and not infrequently even an improvement
in productive technology. The murder of a factory owner
produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of
proprietors devoid of any social significance. Whether a
terrorist attempt, even a 'successful' one throws the
ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete
political circumstances. In any case the confusion can
only be shortlived; the capitalist state does not base
itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated
with them. The classes it serves will always find new
people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to
function.
But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working
masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper.
If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to
achieve one's goal, why the efforts of the class
struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk
of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck,
what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes
sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar
of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why
meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so
easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery
of parliament?
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely
because it belittles the role of the masses in their own
consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness,
and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger
and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his
mission.
The anarchist prophets of the 'propaganda
of the deed' can argue all they want about the elevating
and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the
masses. Theoretical considerations and political
experience prove otherwise.
The more 'effective' the terrorist acts,
the greater their impact, the more they reduce the
interest of the masses in self-organisation and
self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears
away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered
minister makes his appearance, life again settles into
the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns
as before; only the police repression grows more savage
and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled
hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes
disillusionment and apathy.
The efforts of reaction to put an end to strikes and to
the mass workers' movement in general have always,
everywhere, ended in failure. Capitalist society needs an
active, mobile and intelligent proletariat; it cannot,
therefore, bind the proletariat hand and foot for very
long. On the other hand, the anarchist 'propaganda of the
deed' has shown every time that the state is much richer
in the means of physical destruction and mechanical
repression than are the terrorist groups.
If that is so, where does it leave the revolution? Is it
rendered impossible by this state of affairs? Not at all.
For the revolution is not a simple aggregate of
mechanical means. The revolution can arise only out of
the sharpening of the class struggle, and it can find a
guarantee of victory only in the social functions of the
proletariat. The mass political strike, the armed
insurrection, the conquest of state power - all this is
determined by the degree to which production has been
developed, the alignment of class forces, the
proletariat's social weight, and finally, by the social
composition of the army, since the armed forces are the
factor that in time of revolution determines the fate of
state power.
Social Democracy is realistic enough not to try to avoid
the revolution that is developing out of the existing
historical conditions; on the contrary, it is moving to
meet the revolution with eyes wide open. But - contrary
to the anarchists and in direct struggle against them -
Social Democracy rejects all methods and means that have
as their goal to artificially force the development of
society and to substitute chemical preparations for the
insufficient revolutionary strength of the
proletariat.
Before it is elevated to the level of a method of
political struggle, terrorism makes its appearance in the
form of individual acts of revenge. So it was in Russia,
the classic land of terrorism. The flogging of political
prisoners impelled Vera Zasulich to give expression to
the general feeling of indignation by an assassination
attempt on General Trepov. Her example was imitated in
the circles of the revolutionary intelligentsia, who
lacked any mass support. What began as an act of
unthinking revenge was developed into an entire system in
1879-81. The outbreaks of anarchist assassination in
Western Europe and North America always come after some
atrocity committed by the government - the shooting of
strikers or executions of political opponents. The most
important psychological source of terrorism is always the
feeling of revenge in search of an outlet.
There is no need to belabour the point that Social
Democracy has nothing in common with those
bought-and-paid-for moralists who, in response to any
terrorist act, make solemn declarations about the
'absolute value' of human life. These are the same people
who, on other occasions, in the name of other absolute
values - for example, the nation's honour or the
monarch's prestige - are ready to shove millions of
people into the hell of war. Today their national hero is
the minister who gives the sacred right of private
property; and tomorrow, when the desperate hand of the
unemployed workers is clenched into a fist or picks upon
a weapon, they will start in with all sorts of nonsense
about the inadmissibility of violence in any form.
Whatever the eunuchs and pharisees of morality may say,
the feeling of revenge has its rights. It does the
working class the greatest moral credit that it does not
look with vacant indifference upon what is going on in
this best of all possible worlds. Not to extinguish the
proletariat's unfulfilled feeling of revenge, but on the
contrary to stir it up again and again, to deepen it, and
to direct it against the real causes of all injustice and
human baseness - that is the task of the Social
Democracy.
If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because
individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we
have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to
be presented to some functionary called a minister. To
learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the
indignities to which the human body and spirit are
subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of
the existing social system, in order to direct all our
energies into a collective struggle against this system -
that is the direction in which the burning desire for
revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.
The Bankruptcy of Individual
Terrorism, 1909
For a whole month, the attention of everyone who was able
to read and reflect at all, both in Russia and throughout
the world, has been focused on Azef. His 'case' is known
to one and all from the legal newspapers and from
accounts of the Duma debates over the demand raised by
Duma deputies for an interpellation about Azef.
Now Azef has had time to recede into the background. His
name appears less and less frequently in the newspapers.
However, before once and for all leaving Azef to the
garbage heap of history, we think it necessary to sum up
the main political lessons - not as regards the
machinations of the Azef types per se, but with regard to
terrorism as a whole, and to the attitude held toward it
by the main political parties in the country.
Individual terror as a method for political revolution is
our Russian 'national' contribution.
Of course, the killing of 'tyrants' is almost as old as
the institution of 'tyranny' itself; and poets of all
centuries have composed more than a few hymns in honour
of the liberating dagger.
But systematic terror, taking as its task the elimination
of satrap after satrap, minister after minister, monarch
after monarch - 'Sashka after Sashka' (a diminutive
referring to the two tsars Alexander II and III), as an
1880s Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) member familiarly
formulated the programme for terror - this kind of
terror, adjusting itself to absolutism's bureaucratic
hierarchy and creating its own revolutionary bureaucracy,
is the product of the unique creative powers of the
Russian intelligentsia.
Of course, there must be deep-seated reasons for this -
and we should seek them, first, in the nature of the
Russian autocracy and, second, in the nature of the
Russian intelligentsia.
Before the very idea of destroying absolutism by
mechanical means could acquire popularity, the state
apparatus had to be seen as a purely external organ of
coercion, having no roots in the social organisation
itself. And this is precisely how the Russian autocracy
appeared to the revolutionary intelligentsia.
Historical basis of Russian terrorism
This illusion had its own historical
basis. Tsarism took shape under the pressure of the more
culturally advanced states of the West. In order to hold
its own in competition, it had to bleed the popular
masses dry, and in doing so it cut the economic ground
from under the feet of even the most privileged classes.
And these classes were not able to raise themselves to
the high political level attained by the privileged
classes in the West.
To this, in the nineteenth century, was added the
powerful pressure of the European stock exchange. The
greater the sums it loaned to the tsarist regime, the
less tsarism depended directly upon the economic
relations within the country.
By means of European capital, it armed itself with
European military technology, and it thus grew into a
"self-sufficient" (in a relative sense, of course)
organisation, elevating itself above all classes of
society.
Such a situation could naturally give rise to the idea of
blasting this extraneous superstructure into the air with
dynamite.
The intelligentsia had developed under the direct and
immediate pressure of the West; like their enemy, the
state, they rushed ahead of the country's level of
economic development - the state, technologically; the
intelligentsia, ideologically.
Whereas in the older bourgeois societies of Europe
revolutionary ideas developed more or less parallel with
the development of the broad revolutionary forces, in
Russia the intelligentsia gained access to the ready-made
cultural and political ideas of the West and had their
thinking revolutionised before the economic development
of the country had given birth to serious revolutionary
classes from which they could get support.
Outdated by history
Under these conditions, nothing remained
for the intelligentsia but to multiply their
revolutionary enthusiasm by the explosive force of
nitro-glycerin. So arose the classical terrorism of
Narodnaya Volya.
The terror of the Social Revolutionaries was by and large
a product of those same historical factors: the
"self-sufficient" despotism of the Russian state, on the
one hand, and the "self-sufficient" Russian revolutionary
intelligentsia on the other.
But two decades did not go by without having some effect,
and by the time the terrorists of the second wave appear,
they do so as epigones, marked with the stamp "outdated
by history."
The epoch of capitalist "Sturm und Drang" (storm and
stress) of the 1880s and 1890s produced and consolidated
a large industrial proletariat, making serious inroads
into the economic isolation of the countryside and
linking it more closely with the factory and the
city.
Behind the Narodnaya Volya, there really was no
revolutionary class. The Social Revolutionaries simply
did not want to see the revolutionary proletariat; at
least they were not able to appreciate its full
historical significance.
Of course, one can easily collect a dozen odd quotations
from Social Revolutionary literature stating that they
pose terror not instead of the mass struggle but together
with it. But these quotations bear witness only to the
struggle the ideologists of terror have had to conduct
against the Marxists - the theoreticians of mass
struggle.
But this does not change matters. By its very essence
terrorist work demands such concentrated energy for "the
great moment," such an overestimation of the significance
of individual heroism, and finally, such a "hermetic"
conspiracy, that - if not logically, then psychologically
- it totally excludes agitational and organisational work
among the masses.
For terrorists, in the entire field of politics there
exist only two central focuses: the government and the
Combat Organisation. "The government is ready to
temporarily reconcile itself to the existence of all
other currents," Gershuni (a founder of the Combat
Organisation of the SRs) wrote to his comrades at a time
when he was facing the death sentence, "but it has
decided to direct all its blows towards crushing the
Social Revolutionary Party."
"I sincerely trust," said Kalayev (another SR terrorist)
writing at a similar moment, "that our generation, headed
by the Combat Organisation, will do away with the
autocracy."
Everything that is outside the framework of terror is
only the setting for the struggle; at best, an auxiliary
means. In the blinding flash of exploding bombs, the
contours of political parties and the dividing lines of
the class struggle disappear without a trace.
And we hear the voice of that greatest of romantics and
the best practitioner of the new terrorism, Gershuni,
urging his comrades to "avoid a break with not only the
ranks of the revolutionaries, but even a break with the
opposition parties in general."
The logic of terrorism
"Not instead of the masses, but together
with them." However, terrorism is too "absolute" a form
of struggle to be content with a limited and subordinate
role in the party.
Engendered by the absence of a revolutionary class,
regenerated later by a lack of confidence in the
revolutionary masses, terrorism can maintain itself only
by exploiting the weakness and disorganisation of the
masses, minimising their conquests, and exaggerating
their defeats.
"They see that it is impossible, given the nature of
modern armaments, for the popular masses to use
pitchforks and cudgels - those age-old weapons of the
people - to destroy the Bastilles of modern times,"
defence attorney Zhdanov said of the terrorists during
the trial of Kalyaev.
"After January 9 (the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre, which
marked the start of the 190S revolution), they saw very
well what was involved; and they answered the machine gun
and rapid-firing rifle with the revolver and the bomb;
such are the barricades of the twentieth century."
The revolvers of individual heroes instead of the
people's cudgels and pitchforks; bombs instead of
barricades - that is the real formula of terrorism.
And no matter what sort of subordinate role terror is
relegated to by the "synthetic" theoreticians of the
party, it always occupies a special place of honour in
fact. And the Combat Organisation, which the official
party hierarchy places under the Central Committee,
inevitably turns out to be above it, above the party and
all its work - until cruel fate places it under the
police department.
And that is precisely why the collapse of the Combat
Organisation as a result of a police conspiracy
inevitably means the political collapse of the party as
well.
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