Click On Title To Link To 1938 Leon Trotsky Article "For Grynszpan" Mentioned Below.
This year marks the 69th anniversary of the Stalin-directed assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky.
Book Review (of sorts)
Marxism &Terrorism, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
I have gone on endlessly in this space, as is only natural for a space ultimately dedicated to the struggle for revolutionary change, about the Russian October Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolsheviks and that created in its wake the first workers state in world history that held out for any length of time. (We always, and rightly so, pay homage to the Paris Commune of 1871 as the first experiment of a workers government but that, to our sorrow, lasted only a couple of months.) Needless to say, anyone who stands on the political grounds of that revolution as this writer does is anxious to distill the lessons to be drawn from that experience, for better or worst. Moreover, it is not just the immediate lessons of the Russian case about the necessity of overthrowing of the old Czarist order, of its replacement provisional government and of the need for a combat working class vanguard party to carry out those tasks but the whole pre-history of struggle against other tendencies fighting for leadership in the broader revolutionary movement. In Russia, a mainly peasant society in the 19th century, this included a long term fight against the strategy of exemplary individual acts of terror as a catalyst in order to remove the moribund Czarist regime.
Needless to say, if one is to learn anything at all from our long international revolutionary history, modern revolutions do not just fall from the sky but are prepared, and necessarily need to be well-prepared, by the creation of a cadre that has assimilated the experiences, good and bad, of the whole prior revolutionary movement. In this the year of the 69th anniversary of the Stalinist assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky down in his Mexican exile there is no more fitting way to pay tribute to his place in the revolutionary pantheon than to look at a couple of aspects of his work. Here, in a short review of a few of his previously published articles on the subject, it is the question of the use of terror in order achieve to one’s political goals. In an accompanying commentary also posted on this date I will turn the tables 180 degrees and discuss some of Trotsky’s contributions to Marxist literary theory and the struggle for socialist culture, subjects he spend some time on as well.
Excepting only Lenin, no other name is so closely identified with the high expectations that derived from the October Revolution of 1917 as Leon Trotsky. In a certain sense today to speak of the Russian Revolution is to evoke the specter of Trotsky’s ghost as he was the last widely known original fighter on the last barricade, pen in hand, in defense of the initial goals of that experience. Moreover, as a military leader, organizer of insurrection , high Soviet official, political pamphleteer and literary critic he was well placed to discuss the relative merits of the mass working class organizational methods of changing the world and of comparing that strategy to one of isolated heroic actions on behalf of such changes.
Without delving deeply in his biography here Leon Trotsky, whatever else his accomplishments, was a convinced revolutionary from his youth and spent the next forty years or so of his life in dogged pursuit of those youthful aims. Before the Russian Revolutions of 1905 (in which he played a big role as President Of The Petrograd Soviet), the February 1917 Revolution (which started during a period when he was in exile in America) and the victory in October which he organized and led he had many years experience fighting those tendencies in the Russian and international socialist movement that saw isolated “propaganda of the deed” actions as a viable strategy for social change. Thus, in one man (and there were others, to be sure, but Trotsky is the outstanding representative), we have encapsulated the experience of the whole Russian revolutionary movement from the last quarter of the 19th century. Trotsky knew, first hand, from personal polemical combat with the Russian Narodniks (People’s Will and various other organizations) and their political heirs in the then emerging Social Revolutionary Party that individual terrorist actions while, perhaps, morally satisfying were politically self-defeating, at best.
The above paragraphs can thus serve as something of a preface to this tiny little booklet of Trotsky articles put out by Pathfinder Press, “Marxism & Terrorism”, about the Marxist attitude toward individual terror, or for that matter mass terror, as a means for achieving progressive social goals. I place special emphasis on those last few words of the last sentence because most of the talk about terror and terrorists today centers on various actions of Islamic and other religious fundamentalists and their reactionary agendas. Those actions are generally beyond the pale of what Marxists understand as the use of terror as a political strategy. The actions that are of concern to Marxists , as noted by Trotsky in an article (Vienna “Pravda”, his newspaper at the time I believe, March 27, 1909) about the Social Revolutionary Party in early 20th century Russia. That party, based on the peasantry, but which had a strong bend toward a policy of individual assassination of governmental officials, reflected a long-time historic tendency in the Russian revolutionary movement.
As Trotsky acidly notes, such actions are futile, as witnessed by the ease that the various constituted governments had in replacing these officials at will. Furthermore, what really happens is that the political/combat organizations based on such strategies, of necessity, draw in on themselves and are very vulnerable to police infiltration or cadre attrition. The history of the progressive social movements of the 20th century, if not at present, only confirm those points.
To finish up though, I want make a point clear here, as Trotsky does in his short article from 1938 entitled “ For Grynszpan” in which he speaks of the question of Marxist solidarity with heroic individual actions on behalf of the oppressed, misguided as they might be. The Grynszpan case revolved around the assassination of a Nazi official in Paris by a frustrated Jewish youth shortly before World War II exploded on the Europeon scene. Trotsky, while noting the futility of the action in the grand scheme of things, expressed his moral solidarity with Grynzspan’s actions. And that is exactly the point. We, as Marxists, fight politically against the tendency toward isolated individual acts- that “propaganda of the deed” strategy mentioned above.
However, we have no truck with those, unfortunately too many, so-called leftists who wash their hands of defending those who, mistakenly, fight the battles against the oppressors in a different way than through mass working class organizing. Here I wish to note the abandonment of the Weatherman in America in the 1970’s and later of the militants who were known as the “Ohio Seven” by the “armchair” leftists of those times. Internationally, that was similarly the fate of the German Bader-Meinhof Group and of the Italian Red Brigades, among others. Trotsky had it just about right, fight against the strategy of individual acts of terror but also show appropriate scorn to those Social Democratic and “Communist” political cowards who run for cover when the state put the heat on. See, I told you the Russian Revolution and Comrade Trotsky had plenty of lessons to offer that apply today. Let's get to it.
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