Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (; , ) is a book by Soviet Communist Party leader Leon Trotsky. First published in German in August 1920, the short book was written against a criticism of the Russian Revolution by prominent Marxist Karl Kautsky, who expressed his views on the errors of the Bolsheviks in two political tracts, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in 1918 in Vienna, followed by Terrorism and Communism, published in 1920.
Trotsky's book, the first English edition of which bore the title The Defense of Terrorism, dismisses the notion of parliamentary democracy to govern Soviet Russia and defends the use of force against opponents of the revolution by the dictatorship of the proletariat and working class masses.
Background
Kautsky opens the debate
Early in August 1918, mere months after the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution which brought the Communist Party to power in Russia, European Marxist Karl Kautsky published an oppositional political tract, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which charged the Bolsheviks with fomenting civil war due to their failure to uphold the norms of universal suffrage.John H. Kautsky, "Introduction," in Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1964; pp. xv-xvii. Kautsky's pamphlet, Die Diktatur des Proletariats (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat), asserted that the only way to control the growth of bureaucracy and militarism and to defend the rights of political dissidents was through parliamentary democracy based upon free elections and that V. I. Lenin and his political associates had blundered badly by departing from democratic practice in favor of a restricted electorate and the use of extra-parliamentary force.Kautsky, "Introduction," pp. xvii-xviii.
The Bolsheviks had sought broad international support from socialists around the world with a view to the achievement of worldwide revolution on a comparatively short timetable and Kautsky's sharply critical book was regarded by Bolshevik Party leader Lenin as a rank betrayal of the Russian Revolution and a grave threat to the revolutionary socialist mission.Max Shachtman, "Foreword to the New Edition" in Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961; pg. vii. Countering the public opposition by the world-famous Marxist Kautsky was regarded as pivotal. Lenin was quick to respond to Kautsky's book with a bitter counterattack of his own, the short book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written in October and November 1918.V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), in V.I. Lenin Collected Works: Volume 28, July 1918-March 1919. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965; pg. 227.
Lenin railed against Kautsky's pamphlet as the "most lucid example of that utter and ignominious bankruptcy of the Second International about which honest socialists in all countries have been talking for a long time.Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pg. 229. He charged that Kautsky had stripped Marxism of its "revolutionary living spirit" by his rejection of "revolutionary methods of struggle," thereby turning Karl Marx into "a common liberal."Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pp. 229-231. Quoting Frederick Engels as an authority, Lenin contended that "proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the state machine and the substitution for it of a new one."Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pg. 237. Emphasis in original. He minced no words in asserting as a "plain truth" that:
"Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
"The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws."Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pg. 236.
Lenin rejected Kautsky's parliamentarian and legalistic interpretation of the ideas of Marx and Engels, contending that Kautsky knew well that the duo had "repeatedly spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat, before and especially after the Paris Commune" of 1871, and that Kautsky had intentionally made a "monstrous distortion of Marxism" to bolster his own moderate political ideas.Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pg. 233. Emphasis in original.
Kautsky's Terrorism and Communism (1920)
Kautsky responded to Lenin's counterattack with a second pamphlet on the deteriorating political situation in Soviet Russia, a tract entitled Terrorismus und Kommunismus: Ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution (Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of the Revolution), completed in June 1919. With both Russia and Germany descending into chaos and civil war, Kautsky lamented "a world sinking under economic ruin and fratricidal murder," with Socialists fighting against Socialists in both countries "with similar cruelty to that practiced more than half a century ago by the Versailles butchers of the Commune."Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution . London: National Labour Press, 1920; pg. iv. Kautsky sought to draw a historical parallel between the ongoing Russian Revolution and Civil War with the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror which followed, culminating in the overthrow of the revolution by the military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. iii.
After expounding at length upon the dialectic of revolutionary violence in the historic French context, Kautsky turned his focus in the final section of Terrorism and Communism to "The Communists at Work."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pp. 158-234. Kautsky contended that World War I had brutalized the working class and forced it backwards "both morally and intellectually."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 158. The social catastrophe of the war had brought about the Russian Revolution, Kautsky noted, leading to a collapse of the army and confiscation by the peasantry of landed estates for division into individual plots of land.Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 162. The Bolsheviks made calculated use of this elemental force, in Kautsky's view, "introducing anarchy in the country" in exchange for "a completely free hand in the towns in which they had already likewise won over the working classes."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 163.
Mass expropriation of businesses followed, Kautsky charged, "without any attempt being made to discover whether their organisation on Socialist lines was possible."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 166. Success depended upon a "well-disciplined and highly intelligent working class," Kautsky contended, but instead the war had sapped both intelligence and discipline from the workers, leaving only "the most ignorant and most undeveloped sections of the working class in the wildest excitement."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 167. The result had been economic collapse.
A new system of brutality had emerged, in Kautsky's view:
"The bourgeoisie...appears in the Soviet Republic as a special human species, whose characteristics are ineradicable. Just as a negro remains a negro, a Mongolian a Mongolian, whatever his appearance and however he may dress; so a bourgeois remains a bourgeois, even if he becomes a beggar, or lives by his work....
"The bourgeoisie are compelled to work, but they have not the right to choose the work that they understand, and which best corresponds to their abilities. On the contrary, they are forced to carry on the most filthy and most objectionable kind of labour. In return they receive not increased rations, but the very lowest, which scarce suffice to appease their hunger. Their food rations equal only a quarter of those of the soldiers, and of the workingmen who are employed in the factories run by the Soviet Republic.... From all this we perceive not a sign of any attempt to place the proletariat on a higher level, to work out a 'new and higher form of life,' but merely the thirst for vengeance on the part of the proletariat in its most primitive form."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 171.
Kautsky singled out Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky for specific criticism, upbraiding him for having seized power despite an admitted foreknowledge that the Russian working class and the revolutionary intelligentsia acting in its name had lacked "the necessary organisation, the necessary discipline, and the necessary historical education" to successfully establish a new economic and political regime.Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 173. Corruption had flourished in the aftermath and economic production had fallen to a point approaching complete collapse.Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pp. 188-189.
Soon realizing the necessity of technical experts, Kautsky quotes Trotsky's admission that violence had been used to mercilessly destroy the organizations of "saboteurs" using coercion to transform "the saboteurs of yesterday into servants, into administrators, and technical managers, wherever the new regime demands it."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 192. A new centralized administration had emerged, Kautsky contended, one in which "the absolutism of the old bureaucracy has come again to life in a new but...by no means improved form..."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 201. New forms of profiteering, speculation, and corruption were emerging, Kautsky charged, so that "industrial capitalism, from being a private system, has now become a State capitalism."Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, pg. 202.
Kautsky concluded that ultimately the use of force and dictatorial methods would lead not to socialism, but to some new oppressive social system.Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978; pg. 248. It was to this challenge that Leon Trotsky was to respond.
Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism (1920)
Trotsky replied to Kautsky with a short book completed at the end of May 1920Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961; pg. 11. and published in Hamburg in August by the publishing house of the Berlin-based West European Secretariat of the Communist International, Terrorismus und Kommunismus: Anti-Kautsky (Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky). The book was written, Trotsky remembered in 1935, inside a coach attached to his armored train during the tumultuous Polish Campaign of the Russian Civil War.Leon Trotsky, "Introduction to the Second English Edition" , in Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961; pg. xxxvii. Trotsky retrospectively ascribed the book's harshness of tone to the time and place in which it was written.
Trotsky recalled:
"So long as the class struggle flowed between the peaceful shores of parliamentarism, Kautsky, like thousands of others, indulged himself in the luxury of revolutionary criticism and bold perspectives: in practice these did not bind him to anything. But when the war and the after-war period brought the problems of revolution onto the field, Kautsky took up his position definitively on the other side of the barricade. Without breaking away from Marxist phraseology he made himself, instead of the champion of the proletarian revolution, the advocate of passivity of a crawling capitulation before Imperialism."