Socialist Worker 

May 30, 2012

IN AN article titled "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism," the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued:

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-organization 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.

In their youth, both Trotsky and Lenin were highly influenced by the Russian Narodik or Populist movement that Trotsky criticized in the passage above. As a teenager, Trotsky's first encounter with radical ideas was with a loosely organized Narodnik discussion group. He challenged a friend's adherence to Marxism by mocking it as a "doctrine for shopkeepers and merchants."

Lenin's older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was executed in May 1887 for his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. In his book What Is to Be Done? Lenin wrote that many Russian socialists had:

begun their revolutionary thinking as adherents of Narodnaya Volya (People's Will). Nearly all had, in their early youth, enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist heroes. It required a struggle to abandon the captivating impressions of those heroic traditions, and the struggle was accompanied by the breaking off of personal relations with people who were determined to remain loyal to the Narodnaya Volya.

Narodism looked to Russia's massive peasantry as the decisive revolutionary force in the overthrow of the brutally oppressive system of Tsarism. In the 1870s, thousands of middle-class Russian youth went to the countryside to educate and win over the peasantry to the goal of a mass uprising. When the peasants didn't respond to the revolutionary message as eagerly as expected, the movement swung towards plots against leading figures of the Tsarist regime, in the hopes that this would spark rebellion.

In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was successfully assassinated. However, instead of a nationwide peasant revolt, the deed produced a wave of repression subduing the revolutionary movement for years.

By the end of 19th century, capitalism had sunk roots in the cities of Russia, and a powerful working class movement, though still a minority of the population, began to emerge. With the appearance of several strike waves, a new generation of revolutionaries rejected the prevailing strategy of individual terrorism and looked to workers as the potential leaders of a society-wide revolt against Tsarism--and, ultimately, the overthrow of capitalism. This is how the revolutionary movement in Russia came to reject the "propaganda of the deed" and terrorism in favor of the Communist Manifesto.

CENTRAL TO Marxism is the argument that the collective struggle of the working class is the only means by which all of humanity can be liberated. Karl Marx put it like this: "The emancipation of the working class must be act of the working class itself."...(Click title for more)