PARTISAN!

First published in 1970 and appearing in Direct Action #1 (September 1970), George Novack makes the argument that terrorism as a strategy used by parts of the Left and Ultra-Left is a deeply individualist and elitist strategy which reflects alienation from real politics, not a development of it.

Terrorism or Marxism?

The problem of terrorism today presents two main facets. One is the attitude to be taken by revolutionists toward this method of attack upon the status quo. The other concerns the reasons why certain ultralefts have been impelled to advocate or resort to individual terrorism. Marxism has a consistent tradition and a crystal-clear position on this question. It is unequivocally opposed to the policy of individual terror. Its condemnation is not based upon moralistic or pacifist considerations and has nothing in common with the hypocritical outcries of liberal or conservative defenders of the status quo against such actions. The Marxist attitude is based on grounds of revolutionary efficacy. Experience and reason alike have shown that this is a counter-productive way of combating the grip of reaction. Why is this so?

Individual terror scorns the masses and disqualifies their capacities by substituting the deeds of a “chosen few” for mass action and organisation. It seeks to disrupt or overthrow capitalism through the detonation of explosives, the destruction of buildings, or the death of a hated official rather than through the political and industrial activities of the working class and its allies among the oppressed.

It is anti-democratic and elitist because its reliance upon the conspiratorial methods of a tiny minority excludes the oppressed masses from conscious participation in the struggle for their liberation. A self-appointed band of saviours arrogates to itself the rights of decision-making in the revolutionary process without submitting the course of action to the tests of approval and adoption by the toilers. Moreover, the secrecy, solitude and separateness demanded by their acts of violence divides and disrupts rather than unifies the revolutionary forces.

Individual terror turns its back on the real class struggle by seeking to replace the real independent class and political activities of the workers with a duel in the dark between a handful of conspirators and the authorities in which the advantages are on the side of reaction. It demoralises and disorients the revolutionary movement by concentration attention upon the pre-occupations of a handful of terrorists rather than meeting the needs of the specific stage of the class struggle for power.

Instead of raising the consciousness of the masses, enhancing their energies and galvanizing them into action, as it claims, individual terror reinforces their passivity and widens the gulf between the vanguard and the masses. It is adventuristic because it tries to compensate for the backwardness of the mass movement and the temporary weakness of its vanguard by artificial means. It is illusory because it seeks to substitute the explosive force of dynamite for realistic and effective means of mass action. It is self-defeating because it plays into the hands of the rulers and their agencies of repression. Individual terror renders a service to the bourgeoisie by enabling it to shift the onus for practicing violence from itself as the guilty party to its revolutionary opponents and thereby to step up its efforts at repression. Whatever its immediate effect, terrorism of this type aids the maintenance of the existing system in the long run.

Elitist

Terrorism is a product of subjectivism and impatience, of frustration and desperation. Despite the loud noises made by its intermittent chemical warfare, it is an expression of political and social defeatism arising from a fundamental lack of confidence in the potential of the working people to recognise the need to get rid of the capitalist regime, engage it in struggle, and overcome it.

The preparation of terrorist acts provides a happy hunting ground for informers and provocateurs to frame up victims and discredit the revolutionary cause and movement.

In social terms, individual terrorism is not a proletarian but a petty-bourgeois, individualist and elitist mode of action. It is based upon the exaltation of personal heroism and readiness for individual self sacrifice rather than the collective disciplined action involved in the working class movement for emancipation. Its recipe for a short-cut to salvation excludes propaganda, agitation and organisation among the masses and shuns the prolonged, tedious and difficult tasks involved in assembling, educating, and organising a revolutionary party and a class-conscious workers movement.

For these general reasons Marxists have invariably maintained an irreconcilable opposition toward individual terror as a means of political struggle. However much they may sympathise with the good intentions and courage of the perpetrators, they have categorically condemned terrorist acts because of their disastrous political consequences. Such a terrorist policy runs counter to the methods of mass organisation and conscious political struggle against capitalism advocated by scientific socialism.

Numerous recruits to the New Left or ultraleft who profess admiration for Lenin are unfamiliar with the Bolshevik attitude toward terrorism. They make a caricature of Leninism by reducing it to the practice of “revolutionary violence”. What is the real history of this question?

The Marxism movement originated in the Tsarist Russia of the 1880s through the separation of the Liberation of Labor Group headed by Plekhanov from the populist terrorists of their generation. Even under the conditions of severe illegality and underground activity these pioneers deliberately repudiated terrorist adventurism in favour of the organisation of mass struggles led by the workers to overthrow the autocracy.

Lenin & the Bolsheviks

Lenin fought for this same position, even though his elder brother had been hung by the Czar for participating in a terrorist attempt. Lenin came to Marxism after having been convinced that terrorist tactics had to be abandoned if a mass movement with enough power to overturn the monarchy, landlordism and capitalism was to be built. He never wavered in his opposition to individual terror and he and his associates waged many polemical battles against the Social Revolutionaries and anarchists around this issue.

Throughout Lenin’s career the revolutionary movement of Russia was divided into two opposing camps: one headed by the Social Revolutionaries and the anarchists, which proposed and carried out terrorist reprisals against the oppressive authorities, and the other to which all Marxists, right, centre and left, adhered and which decisively opposed these methods.

During the years 1899-1901 there was a vast and varied student movement in the principal cities of Russia which culminated in street battles between these students and cossacks. These confrontations were followed by terrorist reprisals on the part of small combat groups composed of students. However, the autocracy was able to isolate and crush the student insurgents because these actions cut them off from the workers and provided no common platform or points of connection between the two forces. It was only in 1905 when the students and workers joined together in open mass struggle against the regime that their actions had significant revolutionary effects.

Revolutionary Marxism attained the highest expression of its practice in Lenin’s Bolshevism, and the road of mass political struggle and vanguard party organisation it took led to the historic victory of 1917.

Leon Trotsky summarised the attitude of the Russian revolutionists toward terrorism in an article he wrote in 1911 for “Der Kampf”, the theoretical organ of the Austrian Social Democracy:

“Whether or not a terrorist attempt, even if ‘successful’, introduces confusion in the ruling circles, depends upon the concrete political circumstances. In any case, this confusion can only be of short duration. The capitalist state does not rest upon ministers, and cannot be destroyed together with them. The classes whom the state serves will always find new men – the mechanism remains intact and continues to function. But much deeper is that confusion which the terrorist attempts to introduce into the ranks of the working masses. If it is enough to arm oneself with a revolver to reach the goal, then to what end are the endeavours of class struggle? If a pinch of powder and a slug of lead are ample to shoot the enemy through the neck, where is the need for any class organisation? If there is any rhyme or reason in scaring titled personages with the noise of an explosion, what need is there for a party? What is the need of meetings, mass agitation, elections, when it is so easy to take aim at the ministerial bench from the parliamentary gallery? Individual terrorism in our eyes is inadmissable precisely for the reason that it lowers the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to impotence, and directs their glances and hopes toward the great avenger and emancipator who will some day come and accomplish his mission”.

He quoted these words in a pamphlet he wrote 23 years later, four weeks after the assassination of Kirov, leader of the Leningrad organisation of the Russian CP. This act provided Stalin with a pretext for framing up and executing hundreds of innocent victims. High Soviet sources have subsequently disclosed that his secret police contrived the assassination on orders from Stalin himself.

In his comments on that assassination, which was laid at his door, Trotsky wrote:

“… if Marxists have categorically condemned individual terrorism … even when the shots were directed against the agents of the Tsarist government and of capitalist exploitation, then all the more relentlessly will they condemn and reject the criminal adventurism of terrorist acts directed against the bureaucratic representations of the first workers’ state in history … The terrorist organisation of the Communist youth is fostered not by the Left Opposition but by the bureaucracy, by its internal decomposition. Individual terrorism, in its very essence, is bureaucratism turned inside out. For Marxists this law was not discovered yesterday. Bureaucratism has no confidence in the masses, and endeavours to substitute itself for the masses. Terrorism works in the same manner; it seeks to make the masses happy without asking for their participation.”

At the same time, Marxists have always sharply distinguished terrorist adventurism from acts undertaken in self-defence against reactionary assaults, or from violence integrally connected with the progressive side in a civil war or the national liberation struggle of an oppressed people. However, it is the former policy, not the latter forms of struggle, that is at issue in radical circles today.

If Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered individual terror to be inadmissable and harmful in the struggle against Tsarist dictatorship, it is certainly far more out of order under the conditions of struggle for a new society today.

Individualist Cop-out

The ultraleftists fail to assess at its proper value one of the most important sides of the present situation. This is the fact that radicalism has been mounting step by step over the past few years and continues to widen, deepen and intensify.

What is really going on is a polarisation of forces in which the possessors of power and property are trying to halt further advances by the discontented but in which the critics and opponents of capitalism keep gaining new ground and gathering fresh forces. It is ironic that the panicky ultraleft sees fascism triumphing just when the scope of resistance to reaction is greater than at any time since the 1930’s and even when the organised workers are beginning to stir from their prolonged lethargy.

The misconceived choice of tactics like-wise conforms to the subsidiary role the ultraleftists assign themselves in the revolutionary process. Imperialism, they maintain, is primarily threatened and besieged by the colonial peoples and the insurgent Blacks in America. The working class is not only conservative but counter-revolutionary and in the camp of the class enemy. This rules out the possibility of political action or any successful mass struggles against the power structure. Therefore the only available channel of revolutionary action is guerilla warfare reduced to acts of individual terror.

Thus they regard themselves, not as leaders and organisations of any class or mass force, as Marxists do, but as an auxiliary arm of the struggles being carried on by the Third World peoples abroad or at home. All this facilitates and justifies in their eyes giving a terrorist twist to their mechanical and misunderstanding mimicry of the colonial revolutionaries.

So it is that in a few years certain bitterly frustrated youth have taken off on a terrorist trip, in rhetoric or in reality, and traversed a paradoxical political trajectory from liberalism to neo-Anarchism. But the metamorphosis is no more than skin-deep.

Marxism long ago disclosed the underlying kinship between liberalism and anarcho-terrorism. Both liberalism and terrorism repudiate reliance upon the independent and revolutionary organisation and activity of the working masses which is the essence of Marxist politics. Liberalism looks to “progressive, peace-loving” politicians among the capitalist ruling circles to lead the way to the solution of the problems of society. Erstwhile liberals turned terrorist, though thoroughly disillusioned with the old methods, are nevertheless still contemptuous of the masses and rely upon conspiracy and dynamite to do the job. Terrorism is petty-bourgeois liberalism temporarily gone berserk. Both are equally injurious to the promotion of a genuinely proletarian revolutionary movement.