TERRORISM AND THE DIFFICULT ROAD TO A GENERAL REVIVAL OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE

To supplement the numerous articles already published in our press[1], we will begin here by referring back to the classical works of the Marxist movement.

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«A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not on social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war […]. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism»[2].

In these lines Lenin condenses the fundamental principles which must guide Marxists in their analysis of the different immediate manifestations of terrorism, in their appreciation of the role and importance of the «armed struggle conducted by individuals and small groups». These manifestations occur in many different situations but they are all part of an inevitable and unrestrainable process which, if not always civil war, is never social peace.

In the analysis of a particular manifestation of «terrorism», these considerations of principle prohibit in advance any attempt to base a judgement on anything other than the unswerving, permanent opposition to the ruling class’s state – a fundamental characteristic of communists. They prohibit not only any open declaration of social pacifism (as is characteristic of the official «Communist» Parties) but also the more subtle and more dangerous positions which attempt to dodge the problem, refusing to openly and consistently take up the perspective of the class struggle with all this inevitably entails – something which is a necessity for Marxists even when the struggle has not yet burst out into open war.

From the standpoint of these criteria, Marxists can no more «deplore» the phenomenon of individual terrorism than they can «deplore» whatever other manifestation of the endemic crises of bourgeois society. They must first show its material causes and its historical roots, then pose the following question: what significance does this phenomenon have from the point of view of the class struggle, not in general or in the abstract, but here and now? How must it be considered with respect to the development of the class struggle which sooner or later (and today we must admit that it will not be the case of the near future) «in certain periods of acute economic and social crises» must develop into civil war? What task does it impose on a party which must not «make» but lead the revolution, which must, as Lenin said, give the revolution its stamp? What task does it impose on a party which knows in advance that the day of revolution will be reached only through an uneven course of ups and downs with elementary and spontaneous small clashes preceding the great battle, a party which cannot direct this battle if it has not actively prepared itself for it by working to take leadership of these preliminary struggles? In particular, how must the party respond to those who reduce the whole class struggle to terrorism and make it the one and only means of action by the class party, assuming that with such a perspective one could still speak of a party. Those who refuse violence in general, armed struggle in general and terrorism in general are by definition outside of Marxism, but it is not sufficient to demand all these in general (i. e. to demand revolution in general) to have the right to call oneself a Marxist.

Many so-called «left» groups pretend to respond in a Marxist way against «terrorism as an absolute method» (or terrorism «as a principle»). But in reality their responses are completely insufficient and reveal an attempt to cover up the fact that they hedge and hesitate on the question of violence and terrorism in general. Lenin gives us the basic guidelines to follow on this question in the first chapter of Guerrilla Warfare from which we have quoted above. He writes:

«Let us begin from the beginning. What are the fundamental demands which every Marxist should make of an examination of the question of forms of struggle? In the first place, Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognises the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not ‹concoct› them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class-consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defence and attack. Marxism, therefore, positively does not reject any form of struggle. Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at the given moment only, recognising as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation changes. In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim whatever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by ‹systematisers› in the seclusion of their studies. We know – said Kautsky, for instance, when examining the forms of social revolution – that the coming crisis will introduce new forms of struggle that we are now unable to foresee.
In the second place, Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national, cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.»

Thus it is not sufficient to respond to the terrorist ideology as follows: you are for individual violence and we are for class violence, collective violence; this is what distinguishes Marxism from «revolutionary adventurism». Such a formulation is insufficient polemically and has negative effects on the work of the revolutionary preparation of the working class. The grain of truth it contains is that only the violence exercised by the proletariat is the midwife of history – that is to say only the violence of the one revolutionary class in capitalist society, the class which in its arduous struggle is armed with its indispensable organ of the party in order to centralise all its efforts to emancipate itself and in order to direct all the elementary pushes, even «irrational» ones, towards the objective of the seizure of power.

It is also true – and this is something which the theoreticians of anarcho-spontaneous terrorism do not understand – that this objective is not realisable at any given moment. It can be reached only by passing through successive phases where we see not small groups of conspirators or daring individuals entering into the struggle but always greater masses who are set into motion not at all by their «consciousness» or by an internalisation of a rational plan of action, but by the pressure of their material conditions of life. It is undeniable that the supreme demonstration of class violence, insurrection, which ushers in the conquest and dictatorial exercise of power, can only be the «art» that it must be in order to assure victory insofar as it rests «not upon a Party[3], but upon the advanced class». It is possible only insofar as it is based on the «revolutionary upsurge of the people» and knows how to seize this «turning point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest». It is certain that terrorism, whether old or new, whether of the anarchist type at the end of the 19th Century or of Baader and the Red Brigades today, totally ignores these conditions for, as we shall see, it cannot but ignore them.

The boundary line between individual and collective violence, however, is not at all absolute. During the insurrection and in the movement which leads up to it, it is not only the vanguard class which enters into struggle and battles the enemy, but also along with it a fringe of layers and subdivisions of the «people». In such a situation it is pure sophistry to oppose individual terrorism to collective terrorism or even to try to find a clear limit between the two. It is sophistry to pretend that in such a mass (and consequently collective) movement one can exclude or eliminate violent and terrorist initiatives by «individuals and small groups» of the proletariat. It is pure sophistry to pretend that the party must oppose these actions instead of placing them under its direct control. It is sophistry fitting of academicians and armchair revolutionaries, and it serves no other purpose than to indefinitely put off revolutionary violence, the revolution, and the class dictatorship.

In 1906, Lenin spoke of the growing number of armed actions by «individuals and small groups» which «aim at assassinating individuals, chiefs and subordinates in the army and police [or else at] the confiscation of monetary funds both from the government and from private persons»[4]. Those who were shocked by these actions and who cried out in horror against anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism were met with this harsh response by Lenin: in the present situation, these forms of struggle are inevitable, and the task of the revolutionary party is not to shun them out of fear of being disorganised by them but on the contrary to give them the organisation that they fatally lack, and to try to take them «under its control»[5].

Likewise, in 1921, while the Italian proletariat led a difficult defensive struggle against fascism, without however neglecting the favourable occasions for counterattack, and while the Maximalists[6] signed a «peace agreement» with the Fascists, the Communist Party of Italy responded with the following, denouncing the hypocritical arguments of the Maximalists:

«Revolutionary socialism recognises that at a certain moment in history […] the clash between social classes takes the form of civil war. This war, which is fought with all possible means, is manifested episodically at first in skirmishes by patrols which increase in number, expanding their activity and aggressive force. There are those who would want to dictate rules of chivalry in this war. The experience of wars and of past and recent revolutions shows to what point this attempt is infantile and far from the reality anguishly faced in action.

To distinguish in this war between collective violence and individual violence would be to split hairs and to quibble about the possibility of a struggle in which individual violence could be eliminated. And more often than not it is tantamount to a refusal to wage this war. Anyone who is openly opposed to the civil war denies the class struggle itself, for the class struggle, in the socialist view and given the causes which engender it, cannot but lead in the end to civil war. If one is opposed to this war, then one must clearly say this to the proletariat as the gentlemen of the socialist right have all too often done. But if one recognises the historical necessity of civil war, then it is necessary to accept it with all the excesses that come along with it, while at the same time attempting to take leadership of it by following a political discipline and anticipating its outcome»[7].

As concerns the «excesses» which are so vehemently denounced by opportunist propaganda, it is necessary to remember the words that Marx and Engels addressed to the workers on the barricades of the revolution, who where determined not to limit themselves to the objectives set by the bourgeoisie in their common struggle against the old feudal regime:

«Far from opposing so-called excesses – instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections – such instances must not only be tolerated but the leadership of them taken in hand»[8].

There will be those who will respond that the situation today is different than when Marx and Engels wrote these words. This is certainly true. In fact one of our criticisms of both classical and modern day terrorism is precisely that it is incapable of understanding at what moments individual terror is called for and, as a consequence, erects a metaphysical principle valid for any situation and divorced from all material basis. Nevertheless, the party cannot consider only the present since its task is precisely to build today the subjective conditions for the revolutionary struggle tomorrow. It thus has the duty to begin now to prepare its militants and the proletarian vanguard for the day (and whether this day is near or far away is of little importance) when the acts of «individuals or small groups», either spontaneous or organised by the party, will have a real role to play and when their execution must not be stifled by a repugnance for this type of action supposedly justified by «principles». The party has the duty to prepare the proletarian vanguard for the «ideal» solution, which is for the party to take these, actions under its control and utilise them according to its assessment of the actual situation and its general strategy. It also has the duty to prepare them for the possibility – which is to a certain extent inevitable – that these acts will occur outside of its control, as manifestations of healthy proletarian anger.

Just as it is not enough to oppose collective violence to individual violence, it is also insufficient to reject the theory of «exemplary acts» characteristic both of the old terrorism and, supposedly, of its modem variety. To simply reject it is to make the same error that is committed by the ideologists of the «propaganda of the deed»: that which is only a means, and sometimes an expedient, is transformed into an entity (one rejecting it in the absolute, the other advancing it in the absolute). It is certain that neither a revolutionary situation nor the overthrow of the enemy’s machinery of domination can be brought about either by an isolated act of the «dynamitero» or by the effect which such a courageous act supposedly has with respect to «raising the consciousness of the masses» (or the «people», to use a language better suited to this subject).

Marxists, however, do not direct this perfectly correct critique against the act itself; they direct it against its idealisation, its theoretical justification. Precisely because they possess the theoretical tools which prevent them from falling into idealisations of this kind, Marxists must also recognise the value that these acts can have in particular phases of the class struggle. Even sporadic actions of this kind can be of value in intimidating the enemy and even more importantly can serve to strengthen the will of the proletarian fighters, to give them a sense of their own strength and the vulnerability of the enemy, and to show the exploited that the regime against which they revolt is certainly powerful but not all powerful, maybe difficult to destroy but not immortal. In certain aspects and within certain limits, the class struggle obeys the same laws as all other wars. It was not necessary to wait until our «civilised» epoch to discover the effect of intimidation on the attacker as well as on the attacked; and it was not insignificant that Marx and Engels labelled the famous «excesses» as «examples» and called on communists not to deplore them but to encourage them and if possible to lead them.

This point is dealt with in the «Draft Program of Action of the Communist Party of Italy» presented to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International at the end of 1922. The «Draft Program» was based on the Party’s practical experience in the civil war and was completely in accord with the action it carried out in the course of the two preceding years. It explains:

«[Fascism] aims at demoralising and defeating the proletariat by means of the terrorist method, that is to say by giving the proletariat the impression that the fascist forces are invincible and that it is impossible to hold out against them. In order to fight against this process of demoralisation of the masses, it is necessary to make the proletariat realise that to oppose force by force, organisation by organisation, arming by arming, is not a vague slogan which will only be realised in the far distant future, but a practical and realisable activity which alone will make it possible to prepare for a re-emergence of armed actions by the proletariat. In this area of activity, the Party does not set up limits of principle except in the sense that any action which is not planned by the corresponding organs of the party must be rejected (and this includes consequently any individual initiative). This does not mean that we refrain from individual actions aimed at particular individuals in the enemy camp or from those carried out by isolated communist comrades upon the order of the party. It is the contrary, for an action can involve military groups or formations only when the great masses begin to enter into the struggle. In the normal course of class guerrilla warfare, the party must organise actions of individuals or small selected groups, and it must carefully prepare these actions in order to avoid unfavourable consequences. Actions of this type will be directed not only at the armed forces or the fascists but also, in general, at the property, institutions and persons of the bourgeois class and all the bourgeois parties. As a general rule it is necessary to avoid causing too much damage, direct or indirect, to the material interests of the workers. The objective of these actions should be to strike back in retaliation to each and every attack of the enemy against proletarian institutions. In this area, the Communist Party must act in the same way towards the bourgeois institutions as the fascists do towards the proletarian masses. A corollary of this tactic is that in the antifascist campaign it is important not to fall into the fascists’ trap by overemphasising the atrocities and the ruthless character of their actions. While holding fascism responsible for all its actions, it is necessary to guard against taking a tearful attitude and to place the greatest possible emphasis instead on the acts of violence carried out by the forces under the direction of the party or by the proletariat in spontaneous response to the enemy’s attack»[9].

Let us repeat once more that the criteria which guide the class party in its choice of methods of actions are not moralistic criteria. Neither does the party have an infallible recipe for defeating the enemy and securing victory. However in the offensive as in the desperate defensive and even in the most painful defeat, it must attempt to make the most effective use of the «psychological» factors in the social struggle. Although the role and importance of these factors in agitation around economic issues and in strikes is very different than in an episode of open or smouldering civil war, they nevertheless play a role in every situation and it is always necessary to take these factors into consideration, not in order to build them into a myth as does the idealists who erect terrorism as a system, but instead in order to better utilise them as tactical resources.

The year 1921 gave proof not only of how insufficient but how dangerous that orientation, is which propagates the false and petty criticisms of terrorism such as those we have mentioned previously. A wing of the Communist Party of Germany, in reaction against the idiotic theory of «the offensive at all costs» with its perspective of a final and «irreversible» crisis of capitalism, fell into the most defeatist of defensive positions – at all costs. As could be expected, it stigmatised as Blanquism, anarchism, and gangsterism[10] the acts of terror and the reprisals which nuclei of proletarians, who were being hunted down by the police, the army and the courts, engaged in if only to defend themselves and survive – and it would have been too bad for them if they had not done it.

At the Third Congress of the Communist International (1921), Lenin and Trotsky proclaimed that while it is idiotic to preach the permanent offensive, it is treason to refuse the offensive in general and «on principles»; and the International, while condemning the offensive erected as an absolute, saluted the «terrorist» actions of Max Hölz. A party which must lead the class which has the historic mission of attacking the enemy and destroying its central strongholds, evidently cannot renounce the direct and armed attack without committing suicide as a revolutionary party, although it understands that it cannot launch this attack at any given moment. The point that Lenin and Trotsky wanted to make, however, went further than this general recapitulation, and can be summed up in this way: it is an elementary rule of war – and no one knew it better than Trotsky – that one cannot defend oneself efficiently if all attack is renounced a priori. Even in a defensive battle, offensive actions cannot be refused on principle and the opportunity to launch them must not be decided according to an abstract principle but according to a practical evaluation of the situation. This point is further elaborated in one of our basic party texts, in total agreement with the position of the International:

«No communist can harbour prejudices towards the use of armed actions, retaliations and even terror or deny that these actions, which require discipline and organisation, must be directed by the communist party. Just as infantile is the conception that the use of violence and armed actions are reserved for the ‹Great Day› when the supreme struggle for the conquest of power will be launched. In the reality of the revolutionary development, bloody confrontations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are inevitable before the final struggle; they may originate not only from unsuccessful insurrectional attempts on the part of the proletariat, but also from inevitable, partial and transitory clashes between the forces of bourgeois defence and groups of proletarians who have been impelled to rise in arms, or between bands of bourgeois ‹white guards› and workers who have been attacked and provoked by them. It is not correct either to say that communist parties must disavow all such actions and reserve all their force for the final moment, because all struggles necessitate a preparation and a period of training and it is in these preliminary actions that the revolutionary capacity of the party to lead and organise the masses must begin to be forged and tested.
It would be a mistake, however, to deduce from all these preceding considerations that the action of the political class party is merely that of a general staff which could by its mere will, determine the movement of the armed forces and their utilisation. And it would be an imaginary tactical perspective to believe that the party, after having created a military organisation, could launch an attack at a given moment when it would judge its strength to be sufficient to defeat the forces of bourgeois defence.
The offensive action of the party is conceivable only when the reality of the economic and social situation throws the masses into a movement aimed at solving the problems directly related, on the widest scale, to their conditions in life; this movement creates an unrest which can only develop in a truly revolutionary direction on the condition that the party intervenes by clearly establishing its general aims, and rationally and efficiently organising its action, including the military technique. It is certain that the party’s revolutionary preparation can begin to translate itself into planned actions even in the partial movements of the masses: thus retaliation against white terror – whose aims are to give the proletariat the feeling that it is definitively weaker than its adversaries and to make it abandon the revolutionary preparation – is an indispensable tactical means.
However it would be another voluntarist error – for which there cannot and must not be any room in the methods of the Marxist International – to believe that by utilising such military forces, even though they may be extremely well organised on a broad scale, it is possible to change the situations and to provoke the starting of the general revolutionary struggle in the midst of a stagnating situation.»[11]

This passage very clearly indicates the materialist considerations which must guide Marxists on this as well as all other questions in the class struggle. It shows that no Marxist critique of the ideology of terrorism can be made if the object of the critique is the terrorists’ «code of actions» (which in certain situations is unattackable and must only be placed within the framework of a general revolutionary action) or their constantly reoccurring errors in the evaluation of the relations of forces. Instead the terrorist ideology must be attacked at its roots. If not, the critique will fall into the vulgar and defeatist pacifism which so rightly aroused Lenin’s revolutionary furore.

When Fritz Adler assassinated the Austrian prime minister, Stürgkh, October 21, 1916, Lenin’s response was the exact opposite of any kind of pacifism. Taking the floor at the congress of the Swiss Socialist Party, he left open the answer to whether in this particular case it was a question of an «application of terrorism as tactics[12], i. e., systematic organisation of political assassinations unconnected with the mass revolutionary struggle; or whether it was a single act in the transition from the opportunist, non-socialist defence of the fatherland tactics of the official Austrian Social-Democrats to the tactics of revolutionary mass struggle».

But regardless of which it may represent, he went on to say:

«At all events, we are convinced that the experience of revolution and counterrevolution in Russia has proved the correctness of our Party’s more than twenty-year struggle against terrorism as tactics. We must not forget, however, that this struggle was closely connected with a ruthless struggle against opportunism, which was inclined to repudiate the use of all violence by the oppressed classes against their oppressors. We have always stood for the use of violence in the mass struggle and in connection with it. Secondly, we linked the struggle against terrorism with many years of propaganda, started long before December 1905, for an armed uprising. We have regarded the armed uprising not only as the best means by which the proletariat can retaliate to the government’s policy, but also as the inevitable result of the development of the class struggle for socialism and democracy. Thirdly, we have not confined ourselves to accepting violence in principle and to propaganda for armed uprising. For example, four years before the revolution we supported the use of violence by the masses against their oppressors, particularly in street demonstrations. We sought to bring to the whole country the lesson taught by every such demonstration. We began to devote more and more attention to organising sustained and systematic mass resistance against the police and the army, to winning over, through this resistance, as large as possible a part of the army to the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the government, to inducing the peasantry and the army to take a conscious part in this struggle. These are the tactics we have applied in the struggle against terrorism, and it is our firm conviction that they have proved successful»[13].

This short recapitulation of the process of formation of the Bolshevik Party contains the formulation of several fundamental principles. These are linked to the points we have already covered and take us in the direction of those which still remain to be developed. So let us stop here for a moment and examine the principles which Lenin has laid out.

First of all, the critique of terrorism (which is better labelled «individualist» rather than «individual» terrorism) and, in certain circumstances, the open struggle against it, are legitimate and even obligatory only on the condition that they are always linked to the critique of opportunism and the unrelenting struggle against it. It is significant that Lenin explained here that a distinguishing characteristic of opportunism is the rejection of any violence on the part of the oppressed class against the oppressors. Those who adopt such a position have no right to criticise terrorism; the same applies to those who mouth Lenin’s critique of terrorism but who do not themselves attack opportunism.

Secondly, the two «deviations» which the movement historically had to fight in order to establish a class orientation and a solid class organisation – the opportunist deviation and the «terrorist» deviation – cannot be put on the same level. Likewise, as Lenin demonstrated in 1920, «left-wing communism», the «infantile disorder», also cannot be placed on the same level as that form of senile degeneration, which is pacifist, legalist and reformist opportunism. In the case of the latter, there is nothing to salvage and all must be rejected. In the case of the former we can salvage at least – and this is not at all insignificant – the call for violence against the oppressors. Of course, this can be salvaged only by inserting it in the general and many faceted movement of the proletariat, and even of the popular masses, adapting it to the development and necessities of the movement and endeavouring to place it under the «supervision» and even the conscious initiative of the class party. It is only in this, way that we can dispel the confused ideas in which its theoreticians encase it and which, as they express the mentality of the petty-bourgeois, inevitably give it an individualist and impulsive character.

Third, communists do not confine themselves to the demand in principle of violence «of the oppressed against the oppressors» as a general thesis which must be obeyed only in theory. They must extend this demand, in different degrees and in different forms, to the whole range of manifestations of the class struggle, from the most elementary to the most developed[14] which ends in the armed insurrection and the seizure and exercise of power. They must ideologically prepare the proletarians for the necessity of using violence in order to later be in a position to prepare them – and this is what is essential – for using it physically. This is why, as Lenin said, communists must not hesitate to recognise as something deserving «our fullest sympathy» even an isolated, individualist act of anarchism, such as that of Fritz Adler if such an act, as an instinctive reaction of a militant or group of militants, expresses the aim of the proletarian political organisation of beginning to move forwards out of the swamp of opportunism.

Fourth, the Russian experience, which is valuable as an actual historical example, shows exactly under what conditions the «struggle against terrorism» can succeed and push this phenomenon to the sidelines. For this it is necessary that the organised workers’ movement grows and strengthens, that its vanguard elements align themselves on the side of the struggle against the ruling class and its state, and that the class party gains an influence among the working class which enables it to orient the class and take it forward, and to agitate in all its sectors for the general aims of communism, for its principles, its program and its tactics. Then, individual terrorism as a specific phenomenon will tend to pass to the sidelines, but only in the measure where the class movement and the party have taken from it the demand for violence and transformed it; only in the measure where they make it one of the tactical means necessitated in different degrees and forms by the various situations and no longer the single method with supposed miraculous qualities. In other words, it is only by going beyond the narrow limits of individualist terrorism that it is possible to escape the dead end to which it leads.

We must not forget that this type of terrorism, in fact, historically has appeared in one of two historical situations. First, we see it in periods of deep internal social crisis which disrupt and unsettle more or less large layers of the ruling class and its substrata, above all the intellectuals. These strata, incapable of orienting themselves in the existing regime and unable to make a place for themselves within it, are pushed onto the political and social scene and, to the extent that the organised working class movement, the only one which is revolutionary, is lacking, on the ebb, or too weak, they are pushed into the position where they play an ephemeral vanguard role. In the absence of the polarising force of the modern proletariat, these layers are abandoned to their immediate spontaneism and take the direction corresponding to the social factors which motivate them and to their ideology, which is idealist, voluntarist, and moralistic.

This was the case with the essentially populist and Blanquist terrorism which appeared during the 1870’s in Russia, as well as the basically anarchist varieties which appeared in France and Spain at the end of the 19th Century, after the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune and the Spanish republican movements (1873–74).

This type of terrorism has also appeared – for instance in the years immediately preceding and following the 1905 Revolution in Russia and also, in part, today – as a desperate political and moralistic reaction against the predominance of the opportunist currents within the working class movement. As Lenin wrote in 1920 «anarchism [and Lenin included in this term all the varieties not only of anarchist but also populist and Blanquist terrorism] was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities complemented each other»[15]. The decline of the «old» terrorism at the beginning of the 1890’s coincided with the extension and radicalisation of strikes and the birth of the first Marxist groups and circles. The «new» terrorism which has emerged in the years preceding the 1905 Revolution has coincided with the rise of both the working class movement, which had an influence on the peasantry, and the working class party. History has its inexorable laws, even if this escapes the theoreticians of individualist terrorism.

It is very important to see how the critique of individualist terrorism went hand in hand with the unrelenting struggle against the opportunist tendencies within the Russian party, which furnished terrorism with an objective justification. In 1898–1901, a clean break with the terrorist and conspiratorial anarchist and Blanquist tradition was one of the indispensable conditions for the birth of the class party. But as the whole complexity of tasks of revolutionary Marxists became clear with respect to the general perspective and with respect to tactics and organisation, the question of revolutionary terror and its use emerged from the shadows of the past to take its proper place in the perspective of a movement that encompasses all of society and in which the working class takes on the role of protagonist and guide.

In a pamphlet written by Lenin in 1898 – the very pamphlet where he elaborated the function of the proletariat in the double revolution with such clarity that no doubt could be left about the significance of the participation of the proletariat in the democratic revolution – we read:

«Blanquist, conspiratorial traditions are fearfully strong among the former [the Narodniki], so much so that they cannot conceive of political struggle except in the form of political conspiracy. The Social-Democrats, however, are not guilty of such a narrow outlook; they do not believe in conspiracies; they think that the period of conspiracies has long passed away, that to reduce political struggle to conspiracy means, on the one hand, immensely restricting its scope, and, on the other hand, choosing the most unsuitable methods of struggle».

The axis of the critique is thus the «narrowness» of the horizon of the «conspirators on principle» and not its «illegitimacy»; the «inadequacy» of the means they adopt and not their «inconsistency» in the absolute. It is necessary to go beyond the dead end of their actions and their theoretical postulates so that the many-sided activity of Russian social-democrats could develop, an activity which
«consists in spreading by propaganda the teachings of scientific socialism, in spreading among the workers a proper understanding of the various classes in Russian society, of their interrelations, of the struggle between the classes, of the role of the working class in the struggle, of its attitude towards the declining and the developing classes, towards the past and future of capitalism, and understanding of the historical task of international social-democracy and of the Russian working class. Inseparably connected with propaganda is agitation among the workers […]. Agitation among the workers means that the Social-Democrats must take part in all the spontaneous manifestations of the working class struggle, in all the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists over the working day, wages, working conditions, etc., etc.»[16].

In 1900, having already sketched the main line which the tremendous theoretical armament of the Russian party would follow in the years to come, Lenin tackled, in the pamphlet «Urgent Tasks of Our Movement», the delicate problems of a «period of vacillation and doubt bordering on self-negation» which had swept through Russian Social Democracy, attributing it to a faulty orientation in the party’s practical day to day activity. These vacillations and doubts had one of two effects: either «the working class movement is being sundered from socialism» through the practice of aiding the workers to wage the economic struggle without explaining to them «the socialist aim and the political tasks of the movement as a whole»; or «socialism is being sundered from the labour movement» by pretending that since the workers supposedly confine themselves to the economic struggle, the struggle against the government must be waged «entirely by the intelligentsia». The economist error produces as a counteraction the error which reduces politics to a conspiratorial activity, and vice versa. To follow the revolutionary path we must transcend these two deviations and abolish the one-sided character of activities through organising them according to a general tactical plan where each has its own role to play. Lenin writes:
«Our principal and fundamental task is to facilitate the political development and organisation of the working class. Those who push this task into the background, who refuse to subordinate to it all the special tasks and particular methods of struggle, are following a false path and causing serious harm to the movement. And it is being pushed into the background, firstly, by those who call upon revolutionaries to employ only the forces of isolated conspiratorial circles cut off from the working class movement in the struggle against the government. It is being pushed into the background, secondly, by those who restrict the content and scope of political propaganda, agitation and organisation; who think it fit and proper to treat the workers to ‹politics› only at exceptional moments in their lives, only on festive occasions […].
Social-Democracy does not tie its hands, it does not restrict its activities to one preconceived plan or method of political struggle; it recognises all methods of struggle, provided they correspond to the forces at the disposal of the Party and facilitate the achievement of the best results possible under the given conditions. If we have a strongly organised Party, a single strike may turn into a political demonstration, into a political victory over the government. If we have a strongly organised Party, a revolt in a single locality may grow into a victorious revolution»[17].

In 1901, with the programmatic foundations of the party and the general lines of its tactics (the «tactics-as-process» of «What Is to Be Done?») having been laid out, the problem of organisational tasks had to be confronted with urgency. From this point of view, what role does terrorism play? Once again Lenin does not approach the problem abstractly but considers it in relationship to the perspectives, the tasks and the general objectives of the movement and in relationship to the degree of development of the movement’s organ of leadership, the party. It is from this point of view that he sees the problem in «Where to Begin?» Can a given tactical means, terrorism for example, contribute to the reinforcement of the movement or does it carry risks of weakening it or even of destroying it? Lenin writes:
«In principle we have never rejected, and cannot reject, terror. Terror is one of the forms of military action that may be perfectly suitable and even essential at a definite juncture in the battle, given a definite state of the troops and the existence of definite conditions. But the important point is that terror, at the present time, is by no means suggested as an operation for the army in the field, an operation closely connected with and integrated into the entire system of struggle, but as an independent form of occasional attack unrelated to any army. Without a central body and with the weakness of local revolutionary organisations, this, in fact, is all that terror can be. We, therefore, declare emphatically that under the present conditions such a means of struggle is inopportune and unsuitable; that it diverts the most active fighters from their real task, the task which is most important from the standpoint of the interests of the movement as a whole; and that it disorganises the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution […]. Far be it from us to deny the significance of heroic individual blows, but it is our duty to sound a vigorous warning against becoming infatuated with terror, against taking it to be the chief and basic means of struggle as so many people strongly incline to do at present. […]
In other words, the immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle»[18].

The worker’s movement can only break the narrow limits in which it is confined by forces whose viewpoint is tied to immediate circumstances and their variations, when it surpasses its own spontaneous immediatism. The two poles of this spontaneity, which both lead to the subjection of the movement to bourgeois politics, are precisely economism and terrorism. The worker’s movement can overcome and surpass this spontaneity only by assimilating the revolutionary Marxist program, defended with a dogmatic firmness and a constant inflexibility, and imported into the ranks of the movement by the tenacious work of the party. This is what Lenin wrote in «What Is to Be Done?»:
«In the last footnote, we cited the opinion of an Economist and of a non-Social Democratic terrorist, who showed themselves to be accidentally in agreement. Speaking generally, however, there is not an accidental, but a necessary, inherent connection between the two […]. The Economists and the present day terrorists have one common root, namely, subservience to spontaneity […]. At first sight, our assertion may appear paradoxical, so great is the difference between those who stress the ‹drab everyday struggle› and those who call for the most self-sacrificing struggle of individuals. But this is no paradox. The Economists and the terrorists merely bow to different poles of spontaneity; the Economists bow to the spontaneity of the ‹labour movement pure and simple›, while the terrorists bow to the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working class movement into an integral whole […].
Political activity has its logic, quite apart from the consciousness of those who, with the best intentions, call either for terror or for lending the economic struggle itself a political character. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and, in this case, good intentions cannot save one from being drawn ‹along the line of least resistance›.
[…] the terrorists and the Economists underestimate the revolutionary activity of the masses… one group goes out in search of artificial ‹excitants›, the other talks about ‹concrete demands›. But both fail to devote sufficient attention to the development of their own activity in political agitation and in the organisation of political exposures.»[19]

In the following chapters («What Kind of Organisation Do We Require» and «A ‹Conspiratorial› Organisation and ‹Democracy›») Lenin shows in what context the individual terrorist action ceases to be that which it is spontaneously, i. e. a manifestation of «revolutionary adventurism». This is possible only in the context of the complex and organised action of the party; a party which knows the whole scope of its own tasks and is ready to use any workable means in its propaganda and agitation which are directed to all layers of society and concern all relations among classes and all relations between these classes and the state; a party which works to «bring closer and merge into a single whole the elemental destructive force of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries». Lenin writes:
«[…] a strong revolutionary organisation is absolutely necessary precisely for the purpose of giving stability to the movement and of safeguarding it against the possibility of making thoughtless attacks. Precisely at the present time, when no such organisation yet exists, and when the revolutionary movement is rapidly and spontaneously growing, we already observe two opposite extremes (which, as is to be expected, ‹meet›). These are: the utterly unsound economism and the preaching of moderation, and the equally unsound ‹excitative terror› […] there exists Social-Democrats who give way to both these extremes. This is not surprising, for, apart from other reasons, the ‹economic struggle against the employers and the government› can never satisfy revolutionaries, and opposite extremes will therefore always appear here and there. Only a centralised, militant organisation that consistently carries out a Social-Democratic policy, that satisfies, so to speak, all revolutionary instincts and strivings, can safeguard the movement against making thoughtless attacks and prepare attacks that hold out the promise of success.»[20]

To be very clear and to prevent anyone from using his words to procrastinate about taking up the struggle, Lenin added these explicit words in September 1902:
«The Social-Democrats will always warn against adventurism and ruthlessly expose illusions which inevitably end in complete disappointment. We must bear in mind that a revolutionary party is worthy of its name only when it guides in deed the movement of a revolutionary class. We must bear in mind that any popular movement assumes an infinite variety of forms, is constantly developing new forms and discarding the old, and effecting modifications or new combinations of old and new forms. It is our duty to participate actively in this process of working out means and methods of struggle. […] Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle, we demanded work for the preparation of such forms of violence as were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation. We do not close our eyes to the difficulties of this task, but will work at it steadfastly and persistently, undeterred by the objections that this is a matter of the ‹vague and distant future.› Yes, gentlemen, we stand for future and not only past forms of the movement. We give preference to long and arduous work on what promises a future rather than to an ‹easy› repetition of what has been condemned by the past.»[21]

A long and arduous work on what promises a future… Three years later, on September 26, 1905, Lenin devoted a short enthusiastic article «From the Defensive to the Offensive» to the news of what today would be called a «commando» action in the seacoast town of Riga. Seventy people attacked the central prison, killing and wounding some guards; they freed two political prisoners and succeeded in retreating without sustaining heavy losses. Lenin writes:
«It is by engaging in such operations that the pioneers of armed struggle become fused with the masses not merely in world but in deed, assume leadership of the combat squads and contingents of the proletariat, train in the crucible of civil war dozens of popular leaders who, tomorrow, on the day of the workers’ uprising, will be able to help with their experience and their heroic courage thousands and tens of thousands of workers. […]
Our trophies are two revolutionary leaders rescued from prison. This is indeed a brilliant victory!! It is a real victory, scored in a battle against an enemy armed to the teeth. It is no longer a plot against some detested individual, no act of vengeance or desperation, no mere ‹intimidation› – no, it was a well thought-out and prepared commencement of operations by a contingent of the revolutionary army, planned with due regard for the correlations of forces. […] Fortunately, the time has passed when revolution was ‹made› by individual revolutionary terrorists, because the people were not revolutionary. The bomb has ceased to be the weapon of the solitary ‹bomb thrower›, and is becoming an essential weapon of the people.»[22]

In order to reach this point and to reproduce this episode on a large scale, to pass from individual terrorism to mass terrorism which absorbs and utilises the former, required that a higher stage be reached than that attained by the movement which swept along the great masses in 1905. It required a party which had already tackled the problems of armed insurrection and guerrilla warfare (the latter being precisely the struggle of individuals or groups utilising revolutionary terror). It required that the party should have already resolved these problems and based the preparation for the future on these conclusions. Although this future was maybe years away, although it was perhaps to be preceded by discouragements and defeats, the party was able to foresee and prepare for it thanks to its Marxist method – and after the dress rehearsal of 1905 it was finally realised in October 1917.

• • •

In the first part of this article[23] we pointed out the inadequacy of certain criticisms directed at individualist terrorism, and we referred to Lenin’s polemic against the nihilists and populists in order to place this question in its proper perspective. In his long and determined struggle for the formation of the class party, Lenin had to combat both economist spontaneism and the voluntarism of the theoreticians and practitioners of violence and terror divorced from the general class struggle. Then we came to the eve of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. In such a context mass violence and terror, as a response to the needs of the revolution, assume a very precise meaning as Marxist theory has indicated from its origin.

• • •

It is no wonder that Lenin called the Russian Revolution of 1905 the «dress rehearsal» for the 1917 revolution. In reality it was a dress rehearsal for the proletariat, which in the course of the year of upheavals experimented with all the possible forms of struggle: from demonstrations to street-fighting, from isolated and local strikes to general strikes, from urban and rural revolts to attempts at insurrection, from audacious raids on prisons and arsenals to mutinies in the army and, especially, in the navy, from immediate organisations to the formation of the first Soviets of Workers’ Delegates. It was also a dress rehearsal for the party: as the struggle dramatically unfolded the party sharpened its theoretical, programmatic and tactical weapons, placing the problem of the armed insurrection (and the «art of insurrection») on the order of the day, with all that this implied not only in the realisation of insurrection but also in the preparation for it. And if the party was unable to test these weapons in the heat of events, it was able to transmit them as an intangible bequest to Red October in 1917.

Violence and terror, including that exercised by «individuals and small groups», lost their voluntarist, idealist, and «Blanquist» nature in the sequence of revolutionary events. It fell to the Bolsheviks to defend violence and terror in this precise context, opposing not only the avowed opportunists but also the revolutionaries in words, i. e. the Mensheviks and Plekhanov himself.

The revolution had barely broken out when, at the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party convened at London from 17 April to 10 May 1905, (12 to 25 April by the old calendar), Lenin presented a resolution on «The Attitude of the R.S.D.L.P. Towards the Armed Uprising». Even though he later agreed to attenuate certain formulations and render others more precise, we reproduce it here:
«1. Whereas the proletariat, being, by virtue of its position, the foremost and most consistent revolutionary class, is therefore called upon to play the role of leader and guide of the general democratic revolutionary movement in Russia;
2. Whereas only the performance of this role during the revolution will ensure the proletariat the most advantageous position in the ensuing struggle for socialism against the propertied classes of the bourgeois-democratic Russia about to be born; and
3. Whereas the proletariat can perform this role only if it is organised under the banner of Social-Democracy into an independent political force and if it acts in strikes and demonstrations with the fullest possible unity;
Therefore, the Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. resolves that the task of organising the forces of the proletariat for direct struggle against the autocracy by means of mass political strikes and the armed uprising, and of setting up for this purpose an apparatus for information and leadership, is one of the chief tasks of the Party at the present revolutionary moment; for which reason the Congress instructs both the CC. and the local committees and leagues to start preparing the political mass strike as well as the organisation of special groups for the obtainment and distribution of arms, for the elaboration of a plan of the armed uprising and the direct leadership of the rising. The fulfilment of this task can and should proceed in such a way as will not only not in the least prejudice the general work of awakening the class-consciousness of the proletariat, but, on the contrary, will render that work more effective and successful.»[24]

It is the revolution itself that «teaches the masses of the people». For the party, the problem is to know if on its part it will be able to «teach the revolution anything»[25]. As long as the workers’ movement has existed the party has had the double task of arming the proletariat «with a sense of the burning necessity to arm» for its objective of seizing power, and of bringing «home to those who are conscious of it the need for organisation and planned action, the need for considering the whole political situation». In a «normal» situation, the party tempers the generous but impotent will «to mete out summary justice to the bourgeoisie and its servitors» and counterposes to it the strength «of organisation and discipline, the force of consciousness, the consciousness that individual acts of assassination are absurd, that the hour for the serious revolutionary struggle of the people has not yet struck, that the political situation is not ripe for it». Under such circumstances the Party will never «bid the people arm, but… will always make it [its] duty… to arm them with a sense of the burning necessity to arm and attack the enemy». But in a revolutionary situation such as 1905, the same party «following the initiative of the revolutionary workers [has] now issued the slogan, TO ARMS!»[26].

This passage shows clearly the position of revolutionary Marxists. It is opposed to that of the «windbags» who in all circumstances avoid (or have renounced once and for all) propagating the necessity of preparing for this armed insurrection, without which the conquest of power and further transition to socialism are only phantasmagoria. It is also opposed to the position of the voluntarists who take up arms or call the proletarians to arms at any moment without paying serious attention to the real relationship of forces. If the first are contemptible because they have in reality abandoned the revolutionary perspective, the second are an ineffective and disorganising factor because they presume to substitute themselves for the force of things, which is also the force of the class and the revolutionary party. Moreover, in the course of insurrectionary movements, the Marxist position is opposed as much to those who confuse insurrection with the struggle of certain individuals against other individuals, as to those who in effect advocate the necessity of insurrection, but refuse to organise it in the living heart of the general class struggle because, even if they won’t admit it, «they are terrorised by the idea that it is up to them to realise it».

With this position irrevocably asserted, Lenin follows the infinitely varied and complex developments of the revolutionary struggle with an anxious and ardent clarity, recording its events and showing Marxist militants how to assume a «guiding and leading role» in all domains, including (but not only) that of military preparation. Let us cite a few fragments of his remarks and instructions. In August 1905 he wrote:
«However much you may turn up your noses, gentlemen, at the question of night attacks and similar purely tactical military questions, however much you may pull wry faces about the ‹plan› of assigning secretaries of organisations, or their members in general, to stand on duty to provide for any military exigency – life goes its own way, revolution teaches, taking in hand and shaking up the most inveterate pedants. During civil war military questions must of necessity be studied down to the last detail, and the interest the workers show in these questions is a most legitimate and healthy phenomenon. Headquarters (or members of the organisations on duty) must of necessity be organised. The stationing of patrols and the billeting of squads are all purely military functions; they are all initial operations of a revolutionary army and constitute the organisation of an insurrection, the organisation of revolutionary rule, which matures and becomes stronger through these small preparations, through these minor clashes, testing its own strength, learning to fight, training itself for victory.»[27]

It is also urgent to confront these extremely complex problems. Even in Lenin’s most violent passage there is not a trace of «adventurism» or excessive haste:
«Insurrection is an important word. A call to insurrection is an extremely serious call. The more complex the social system, the better the organisation of state power, and the more perfected the military machine, the more impermissible is it to launch such a slogan without due thought. And we have stated repeatedly that the revolutionary Social-Democrats have long been preparing to launch it, but have launched it as a direct call only when there could be no doubt whatever of the gravity, widespread and deep roots of the revolutionary movement, no doubt of matters having literally come to a head… The slogan of insurrection is a slogan for deciding the issue by material force, which in present-day European civilisation can only be military force. This slogan should not be put forward until the general prerequisites for revolution have matured, until the mosses have definitely shown that they have been roused and are ready to act, until the external circumstances have led to an open crisis. But once such a slogan has been issued, it would be an arrant disgrace to retreat from it, back to moral force again. to one of the conditions that prepare the ground for an uprising, to a ‹possible transition›, etc…, etc. No, once the die is cast, all subterfuges must be done with; it must be explained directly and openly to the masses what the practical conditions for a successful revolution are at the present time.»[28]

Once again it is necessary to be able to learn from the revolution, and to be able to teach it something. It is necessary to be able to decide emphatically after having appraised the situation coldly and chosen the moment. It is necessary to precede the movement of the masses, but only after having prepared them mentally and materially for the necessity of an irreversible decision. It must not be pretended that the masses are sufficient in themselves, nor that the party is sufficient in itself, much less its «military arm», which certain theorisation’s transform into a substitute for the party. The revolutionary process is characterised by the volcanic eruption of social forces which force their way in a thousand directions, which create and recreate, abandon and then resume organisational forms in which their energies gradually seek direction and discipline. Each of them has repercussions on the others: they are all connected. They all stand or fall together.

In July 1906, the first revolutionary wave had receded, but all signs pointed to a vigorous resurgence. This seemed so imminent that the Bolsheviks had to openly boycott the elections to the Duma, proposed as a safety-valve for the anger of the workers and peasants. At that moment Lenin called attention to the fact that the «last word» of the mass movement in the course of the last quarter of 1905 had been the political general strike. He showed that this strike was certainly a necessary condition for the development of a situation of high social tension, but nonetheless would remain insufficient if it did not give rise to the insurrection. The latter was called for by the very fact that the political general strike came up against an adversary conscious that he was playing his last card: «independently of our will, in spite of any ‹directive›, the acute revolutionary situation will transform the demonstration into a strike, the protest into struggle, the strike into an insurrection». And it is only the development of this ascending chain of events, whose links overlap one another, which will be able to pose the necessity of the conquest of power with absolute clarity for the broad masses.

At the end of 1905 we saw the Soviets of workers’ delegates emerge from the strike as organs of mass struggle. But «by force of circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general revolutionary struggle against the government»: they were «irresistibly transformed… into organs of an uprising». However, if the Soviets are «necessary for welding the masses together, for creating unity in the struggle, for handing on the party slogans (or slogans advanced by agreement between parties) of political leadership, for awakening the interest of the masses, for rousing and attracting them», they «are not sufficient for organising the immediate fighting forces, for organising an uprising in the narrowest sense of the word». Even more, the very survival of the Soviets implies the existence of a «military organisation alongside the organisation of Soviets, for defending the latter, for carrying out an uprising without which the Soviets or any elected representatives of the masses will remain powerless». The creation of these military organs obviously cannot be the work of the Party forces alone: the organisation of the masses «into light, mobile, small fighting units will, when things begin to move, render a very great service in regard to procuring arms.»[29]

This still does not suffice. The Moscow insurrection in December 1905 proved Plekhanov wrong when he cried that «arms must not be taken up»; the events made it very clear that it was necessary on the contrary to take up arms «in a more resolute, more energetic manner and in a more aggressive spirit», and to apply Marx’s instructions that «insurrection is an art, and that the principal rule of this art is the waging of a desperately bold and irrevocably determined offensive». The insurrection also showed that there can be no question of a serious struggle «unless the revolution assumes a mass character and affects the troops». It showed that this fight to «win over» the troops will not be won «at one stroke», but victory will come as a result of a long, tenacious, «bold, resourceful and aggressive» struggle, which will «also be a physical struggle»[30] at the moment of the insurrection.

Finally, and reciprocally, the armed insurrection, the culminating point of the general mass revolutionary struggle, is inconceivable without the activity of «mobile and exceedingly small units, units of ten, three or even two persons». This activity is the very meaning of the «tactics of guerrilla warfare», and it is rendered at once possible and necessary by developments in modern military technology, both as a prelude and as a constituent part of the insurrection as such:
«The guerrilla warfare and mass terror that have been taking place throughout Russia practically without a break since December, will undoubtedly help the masses to learn the correct tactics of an uprising. Social-Democracy must recognise this mass terror and incorporate it into its tactics, organising and controlling it of course, subordinating it to the interests and conditions of the working-class movement and the general revolutionary struggle, while eliminating and ruthlessly lopping off the ‹hooligan› perversion of this guerrilla warfare which was so splendidly and ruthlessly dealt with by our Moscow comrades during the uprising and by the Letts during the days of the famous Lettish republics.»[31]

It is necessary to bear in mind that the insurrection can only be reached at the apogee of a long series of demonstrations and strikes, both economic and political; that the army can be won over only at the apogee of an effort by the proletariat to arm and rearm itself; that the defence detachments for the Soviets can only really be organised at the apogee of the formation and generalisation of the Soviets and so on. Everything holds together, everything converges in the final act of insurrection. This is the immense perspective which Lenin adopts in the draft «Tactical Platform for the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.», and which has nothing in common with the myopic and narrow-minded vision of individualist and voluntarist terrorism. After a new «Resolution on the Armed Insurrection» which summarises the points we just evoked, he proposed the famous resolution on Fighting Guerrilla Operations, completely distorted by those who pretend to refer to it today. It reads:
«Whereas:
(l) scarcely anywhere in Russia since the December uprising has there been a complete cessation of hostilities, which the revolutionary people are now conducting in the form of sporadic guerrilla attacks upon the enemy;
(2) these guerrilla operations, which are inevitable when two hostile armed forces face each other, and when repression by the temporarily triumphant military is rampant, serve to disorganise the enemy’s forces and pave the way for future open and mass armed operations;
(3) such operations are also necessary to enable our fighting squads to acquire fighting experience and military training, for in many places during the December uprising they proved to be unprepared for their new tasks;
We are of the opinion, and propose that the Congress should agree:
(l) that the Party must regard the fighting guerrilla operations of the squads affiliated to or associated with it as being, in principle, permissible and advisable in the present period;
(2) that the character of these fighting guerrilla operations must be adjusted to the task of training leaders of the masses of workers at a time of insurrection, and of acquiring experience in conducting offensive and surprise military operations;
(3) that the paramount immediate object of these operations is to destroy the government, police and military machinery, and to wage a relentless struggle against the active Black-Hundred organisations which are using violence against the population and intimidating it;
(4) that fighting operations are also permissible for the purpose of seizing funds belonging to the enemy, i. e., the autocratic government, to meet the needs of insurrection, particular care being taken that the interests of the people are infringed as little as possible;
(5) that fighting guerrilla operations must be conducted under the control of the Party and, furthermore, in such a way as to prevent the forces of the proletariat from being frittered away and to ensure that the state of the working-class movement and the mood of the broad masses of the given locality are taken into account.»[32]

It is the totality of these considerations (which anarchist or Blanquist voluntarism and romanticism, with all their individualism, ignore systematically) which give «guerrilla action» and «mass terrorism» a role which cannot be separated from the insurrectional struggle for the seizure of power. These assertions bring us back to our point of departure, to the quotations from Lenin’s «Guerrilla Warfare», and our text «Party and Class Action» recalled in Part I of this article. After having recapitulated, on the level of the theoretical struggle as well as practical instructions, the history of Bolshevism from its birth until the threshold of the struggle for power in the revolution of 1905 – the fore bearer of the 1917 revolution –, we can give our critical evaluation not only of individualist terrorism in general but also of its contemporary versions.

If we have taken this indirect route, it has been in order to clarify the attitude of Marxism towards terrorism, an attitude which, as Trotsky remarked concerning the role of conspiracy in the revolutionary process, is contradictory in appearance only: the principled criticism of individual and romantic terrorism goes hand in hand with the advocation of violence and terror in the framework of the general working class strategy of the conquest of power. The avalanche of self-seeking falsifications by the most varied political groups, in their reaction to the acts of the Red Army Faction (Germany) or the Red Brigades (Italy), can only be combated on this basis.

Marxism rejects all explanations of the social phenomenon of terrorism which do not repose on a materialist analysis, and whose material basis Marxists must in turn explain. If it is admitted that individualist terrorism is purely and simply the product of a certain ideology, it would be necessary to seek the objective roots of this ideology: all ideologies are reflections of material realities. If it is admitted that individualist terrorism is the systematic result of «underground dealings» by the «other side», it would be necessary to explain why the «provocation» finds such favourable soil. If it is admitted that terrorism is (in general, and not only in a few rare pathological cases) a «political variant» of current criminality, it would still be necessary to explain both the eminently social phenomenon of criminality, as well as the no less social phenomenon of its political «transfiguration».

Marxism, on its part, connects the phenomenon of individual terrorism to a quite precise historical and social context – failing this it would not have the right to call itself a science. With all due deference to those who pretend to be Marxists even while they advance or propose as Marxist such «explanations» as above, we must state that it is precisely in this manner that Marxism has always proceeded in order to study terrorist actions as well as terrorist «theories».

In most cases Marxism has found the roots of terrorism in a violent internal crisis of the ruling class itself, a crisis which compels even the very sons and daughters of the established order to revolt, including those of the highest strata, but particularly those of lower strata, more directly hit or threatened by the developing or approaching social tremor: the intellectuals, students, and more generally, once capitalism has reached a certain stage or is in the process of developing, the urban petty-bourgeoisie. More rarely, and secondarily, it has found these roots in an elementary and spontaneous reaction (the first secret Societies, for example) of the nascent working class against the upheaval of all traditional living and working conditions caused by the primitive accumulation of capital and the development of big industry. In the particular case of the Red Brigades in Italy, the umbilical cord connecting them to the university movement, particularly 1968, that is to a petty-bourgeois minded social matrix, is obvious.

To the extent that it knows and understands the roots of the phenomenon, Marxism alone is able to explain it historically even though it proceeds to its theoretical demolition. It alone is able to recognise the symptomatic value of events that must take place not only independently of the will, decisions, and conscious objectives of the actors who occupy the foreground of the social stage, but against their will, decisions, and conscious objectives. And for Marxism, the positive or negative value to attribute to these events depends on the material data of the historical situation, never on abstract considerations and much less upon moral judgements! Obviously the idealists can not understand such a viewpoint.

Let us take a few historical examples of the Marxist critique. In 1847, Engels, with Marx, thrashed Heinzen’s «tyrannicide», denouncing the vain pretension to overthrow the existing political and social relations by eliminating the big or small «personage», who in reality is not the cause, but the product of these relations. And in 1878–9 the same Engels greeted the signs of an impending revolution in Russia, which, to be sure, would «start from above, from within an impoverished and irreverent nobility» but which, once it had been set in motion, «would draw the peasants with it» and thus produce scenes «which would make 1793 pale»; the same Engels welcomed «the powerful conspiracy in the army right up to the imperial court»; and the same Engels spoke of «political assassination» as the «only means remaining to intelligent, worthy, and proud men to defend themselves against the agents of an inhuman despotism.»[33]

Moreover, while he conducted a merciless criticism from 1875 to 1894 of the populist ideology in Russia and of its Blanquist origins in order to lay the theoretical-programmatic foundations of the organ of the nascent proletariat, the communist party, again, it was Engels who in 1885 wrote in regard to the powder keg which the Czarist empire had become:
«This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i. e., with one little push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov’s) is in more than labile equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by an action in itself insignificant to release explosive forces that afterwards become uncontrollable. Well now, if ever Blanquism – the fantastic idea of overturning an entire society by the action of a small conspiracy – had a certain raison d’être, that is certainly so now in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic (another favourite image of Plekhanov’s and a very good one) – the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as they themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, as the economic forces and resistances determine.»[34]

Conversely, Marx condemned the voluntarist dreams of Schapper and Willich in the negative condition after 1850 («immediate seizure of power, or else go home to bed»), dreams in which he did not even see the smallest sign of a favourable situation. In the same way Engels condemned the dreams with which the Blanquist communards in their London refuge indulged themselves at the height of the reflux which followed the crushing of the Paris Commune.

But at the same time Marx and Engels explained these dreams from a materialist point of view, from the desperate situation of a working class reduced to impotence and deprived even of the «right of free speech, press and association» after the terrible defeats of 1848–49 in Germany and 1871 in France. And as a result of that generous but powerless will (for the Blanquists did not understand that the working class would only be able to escape from this situation «in 15, 20 or 50 years», and then only on the condition that they work to build tomorrow’s proletarian party), they sought to escape the situation immediately by means of a voluntarist act.

In all these cases, an understanding of the terrorist phenomenon – as an act or as a theory – is the necessary condition for surpassing it by means of a classist and materialist vision of the revolutionary process and the role played in this process by the party. This understanding is all the more necessary as romantic terrorism finds not only an open field of action but almost a justification in the absence or the momentary eclipse of the only historical force capable of polarising the «explosive energies» which lie dormant within society (whether it be the case of pushing the bourgeois democratic revolution to its extreme consequences in a double revolution or of realising the proletarian and communist revolution), that is to say, the proletariat acting as a class.

Next it is necessary to emphasise that the severe judgement of Marxists does not apply to terrorism in general but to the specific form given to it by those who, following Marx’s concise formula apropos of Schapper and Willich, hold an «idealist rather than materialistic [point of view]», for whom «revolutions are not the product of the realities of the situation but the result of a mere effort of will»[35]. What separates us from them is not the question of whether or not violence and terror must be used, but the fact that we have a different and even opposite conception of the revolutionary process, of the class struggle and class war. In our conception the terrorist or exemplary act, the audacious attack, implemented even by «individuals or groups» if not by the mass in upheaval, led and preferably organised by the party, find their natural place and their positive function – just as does «conspiracy» which is a necessary aspect of the insurrection – because all these are inserted into an historical cycle which cannot be reduced to the proportions of a… putsch.

The fundamental principle of the Marxist conception is that the collision of classes is not resolved on the terrain of law but on that of force, a force whose highest manifestation is revolutionary, authoritarian and centralised violence which strikes the capitalist state and which after the conquest of power is transformed into, another form of systematic and planned violence, the proletarian class dictatorship. This is the meaning of the famous words in Capital, «violence, the midwife of the old society pregnant with a new» – and those pacifist academicians who would claim that Marx and Engels did not intend for these words to have their obvious implications and who maintain that the advocation of violence instead was an invention by Lenin (who is placed in the same sack as Stalin) simply propagate a ridiculous and contemptible lie.

To be sure, in London after 1850 Marx and Engels turned their backs on the voluntarist revolutionaries preoccupied with conceptualising «provisional governments of the future» whereas «a new unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set in» and the foundation of social conditions was «so secure and… so bourgeois»[36]. But in the fire of the revolutionary battles of the preceding years, inspired by the needs of the struggle, and not by abstract reflection or a «free choice», it was Marx, whom the bourgeoisie called the red-terror doctor, who wrote: «in order to abbreviate, simplify and concentrate the agony of the old society and the bloody sufferings of the birth of the new, there exists only one means – revolutionary terrorism»! For if the proletariat has none of the «cannibalism» of the bourgeois counterrevolution, it also disdains the hypocrisy with which the latter hides the ferocity of its reprisals. «We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you», said Marx to the Prussian police who prohibited the «Neue Rheinische Zeitung», «when our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.»[37]

In 1850 Marx and Engels broke their organisational ties in the Communist League with Schapper and Willich, those men – nonetheless admired personally – who «replace revolutionary development with the revolutionary phrase»; they devoted themselves to preparing the «future party of opposition», the proletarian class party, for a future which they knew to be quite distant, and to defending «rigorously independent positions». But in March of the same year in the famous «Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League», they gave this party the imperative directive that «the whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon, and ammunition», knowing well that «yesterday’s allies» are today’s and even more so tomorrow’s enemies. They proclaimed that «under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary». In short they stated that «the workers must be armed and organised»[38]. The same year, in «Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany», Engels fixed the imperative tactical guidelines of «insurrection as an art», opposed to the idea of an insurrection abandoned to its own spontaneity, deprived of centralisation and thus of effectiveness, guidelines which necessitate acting «with the greatest determination and on the offensive»[39].

Indeed in 1874 Marxists condemned mercilessly the voluntarism that reigned among the exiled Blanquists. But in the «Class Struggles in France» (1850) Marx pointed to Blanqui as the man who justly personified, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie – and this is the finest homage it could render him – the terrifying spectre «of the declaration of the revolution in permanence and of the class dictatorship of the proletariat» during the tumultuous days of 1848. Again in 1861, Marx exalts him as «the head and heart of the proletarian party in France»[40] because he did not hesitate to confront the enemy on its own ground, that of force, and thus also of violence.

In 1871, eyes fixed on the noble example of the Communards, Marx wrote to Kugelmann that «if they are defeated, only their ‹good nature› will be to blame», above all because they did not want to «start a civil war» by marching immediately on Versailles[41]. Today, the opportunists tremble at the idea that the Red Brigades might possibly – think of it – unleash civil war! After the defeat of the Commune, once again Marx called for in «the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history», the use of the very measures of unveiled retaliation, intimidation, and terror which the vile ruling class made use of against the defeated without hesitating a single second to give its forces the order to «kill, burn, and destroy»[42]. As for Engels, who in 1874 criticised the «revolutionary phrase» of the Blanquists, the same year he reminded the adversaries of authority that:
«A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?»[43]

Can we be more clear than this? Don’t these few passages chosen from among innumerable others anticipate the epic of Red October and the civil war led to victory under the leadership of the «barbarians», «Asiatics», or even «Jacobins» that Lenin and Trotsky were supposed to be?

Because it knows the social roots of individualist terrorism Marxism can define and criticise without difficulty its inherent ideology which governs its actions.

On this level and taking into consideration not the particulars of its manifestations in given circumstances but its historical constants, the «difference» between terrorist romanticism and Marxism becomes incompatibility, and the divergences are transformed into antitheses. In their struggle or their instinctive reaction against the established order the members of the social strata where individualist terrorism germinates – the middle classes including the intelligentsia – trail fatally behind them the baggage of ideological motivations peculiar to their social origins as well as the corresponding forms of action. They revolt as individuals against the weight of the productive, social, and political structures which are suffocating increasingly the «human being» (and which suffocate it all the more so as society pretends to liberate, respect it and enable it to expand). Even when they utilise scraps of Marxist terminology, even when they appeal to the «proletariat» and talk of the «struggle for communism», they situate their revolt fatally under the flag of «bourgeois individualism in reverse», that «individualism which is the basis of the entire anarchist world outlook»[44] in which Lenin recognised the very essence of one of the ideological branches of populist terrorism The necessary complement of this individualism (here it joins the other branch, terrorism elevated to a system, Blanquism) is idealism in the interpretation of history and voluntarism in the theorisation of means of action calculated to modify its course, such as Marx criticised in Schapper and Willich.

In the centre of this world view there are no classes, nor, at their root, any modes and relations of production, but instead unconnected individuals. Contrary to classes which are necessarily impelled to act by material needs, these individuals supposedly act as a result of «free choice» and a decision of their will. They counterpose to the «evil», the power and the privileges enjoyed by the individual oppressors and exploiters, their moral indignation, impassioned will, the force of the idea and the model of a «more just» society thought up by oppressed and exploited individuals.

Here we find the triple «misunderstanding» which Lenin revealed in the anarchist conception, and which already marked the pre-Marxist and anti-Marxist side of Blanquism, as Engels emphasised in his criticism of the… Blanquist refugees in England: «Socialist only in sentiment, full of sympathy for the sufferings of the people, Blanqui possesses neither a socialist theory nor well-defined practical propositions for social intervention». This triple lack of understanding – «lack of understanding of the causes of exploitation of the development of society that leads to socialism… of the class struggle as a creative force realising socialism» – reflects an idealist vision of the revolutionary process. This vision begins from the crude and immediate data of the oppressed-oppressor, exploited-exploiter, ruled-ruler relationship, which is common to all societies divided into classes and thus independent, of the particular society in which one lives and acts, and does not succeed in going beyond that, It is incapable of tracing the material causes that determine this relationship, not in the abstract and divorced from its historical content but in the present mode of production and social life. It is incapable of retracing the class forces which the modern mode of production engenders within it and which tend irresistibly to overthrow it. It is thus incapable of arriving at the ways and means which alone enable these forces to break out of their shell, and at the objectives which the very evolution of this mode of production makes at once possible and necessary. Consequently it is condemned to go around in a vicious circle of illusions and disillusionments from which it believes it will be able to escape by the «act of the will» at once destructive and creative.

For this reason Lenin makes a parallel between economism and terrorism: they are two manifestations, opposed only in appearance, of the same fundamental submission to spontaneity, to the immediate situation. Whereas the «purely economic» (trade-unionist) struggle reduces the historical conflict between the proletarian class and the bourgeois class, with all its necessary implications, to the simple opposition between wage labourers and bosses which limits its horizon, the «purely terrorist» struggle sees only the subject-sovereign (with or without the crown), opposition and reduces the historical conflict from which it expects a «more human» society to the slave-master opposition in general.

If terrorist actions (which today, especially in Europe, issue from the bursting of the 1968 dream of an «anti-power» or «alternativ-power», just as Russian nihilism issued from the disillusionment of those who wanted to «go to the people» in the 1870’s) are opposed by their brilliance to the dull activity of economism, they nonetheless have the same ideological horizon that remains confined within the framework of the order which both believe – sincerely, we admit – they are combating. And if the terrorist is more «respectable» than the economist to the extent that he is an insurgent, he is also more abstract: he reasons in terms that apply indiscriminately to a slave, feudal, or capitalist society, and he acts accordingly.

The illusions of the terrorist flourish on this terrain unavoidably, and not by coincidence. It is unavoidable that he thinks he «strikes the state in the heart» when he strikes the person of its instruments, or when he strikes the productive apparatus in the person of its agents. It is unavoidable that he confuses the network of interests, relations and institutions on which bourgeois society rests with a hierarchy or even a «clique», a pure and simple aggregate of individuals, which for that reason might be vulnerable to the bold undertakings of another group of individuals.

It is unavoidable that he confuses the revolution with a conspiracy of chosen ones whose aim is to overthrow a universal conspiracy of evil individuals. He does not see that in the tightly woven network of the economic structure and the social and political superstructure the personnel called the executive is only a set of interchangeable parts, replaceable and in fact constantly being replaced, in the service of an impersonal, historically determined machine.

It is unavoidable that the terrorist isolates the part – the «centre of power», such and such a government or party – from the whole, and imagines that he «disjoints» the whole by disjointing one part (even for that the classic bomb or more modern kidnapping certainly are not enough…). It is unavoidable that certain groups (particularly in Europe) see the evil as the multinational corporation, whose elimination would render a still capitalist world acceptable.

It is unavoidable that he measures the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary temperature of situations by the thermometer of his own enthusiasm; what does the complex play of relationships of forces matter if it is pure will that creates and leads them? The overestimation of historical situations on the part of the extra and anti-Marxist terrorist by no means results from an «analytical error». On the contrary it is congenital, it is part of his nature and his «raison d’être».

Not only does this submission to spontaneity translate into the impotent attempt to scratch the armour of the «system»; not only is individualist terrorism incapable of disorganising the adversary, even if it can create undeniable difficulties for it, but it is also just as incapable of organising the social forces for which it poses as a representative and defender. Worse, it contributes generally to their disorganisation.

Thus the Russian populists propagated the myth of the people and above all of the Russian peasant who was supposed to be an «instinctive revolutionary»; who still preserved intact the communal institutions which were supposedly forerunners of the future socialist society and who was supposedly ready to take off on his glorious path provided that the armoured shell of a purely political and police superstructure, the Czarist autocracy, were burst. For example, Tkachov, a leader of this current, was
«convinced that it is only necessary to awaken simultaneously in several places the heaped up feeling of exasperation and discontent which… always is present in the bosom of our people. T hen the unification of the revolutionary powers will be achieved by itself… and the struggle must end with a victory for the side of the people. Practical necessity, the instinct of self-preservation achieves thus quite by itself a firm and inseparable bond among the revolting communities».

Engels answered him:
«It is impossible to imagine an easier and more pleasant revolution. An uprising occurs in three or four places simultaneously, and the instinctive revolutionary, ‹practical necessity›, the ‹instinct of self-preservation› do the rest, ‹quite by themselves›. Why, if it is so ridiculously easy, did not the revolution occur long ago, the people liberate itself, and Russia change to a model socialist country?»[45]

With a few slight modifications of vocabulary we have the same myth expressed in the ideology of the present day terrorists, who even when they speak of a «proletariat», confuse it systematically with the people: all we have to do is launch our attack, the proletariat is there, ready, it will revolt on its own; all we have to do is rebel, socialism is there, ready, it will be born on its own.

To reason in this manner is to ignore all the history of the working class which, on the historical scale, is made up of a succession of advances and defeats. It means ignoring the weight of these vicissitudes, the brake constituted by the inertia inherited from the past, and the defection of whole groups of leaders to the enemy. It means ignoring the influence of bourgeois ideology, spread incessantly from all the high pulpits, and the undermining effects of «competition among wage labourers». It means ignoring the difficulty of accomplishing the leap – for a veritable leap has to be made – from the purely economic struggle to the political struggle, the struggle for power and the impossibility (despite whatever grandiose will) of constructing islets of alternative power within bourgeois society. It means forgetting that this party is not created during the struggle and is not born spontaneously and that it does not await its programme – the programme of proletarian emancipation – from the reflections of an «armed faction»; that it can play its role as leadership organ of the revolution only to the extent that it has preceded it, both in programme (which cannot be invented today because it was formulated a century and a half ago) and in practical organisation. And it means forgetting that the party must play this role in order that the revolution, if it breaks out, will not succumb once again.

What must be done, here and now, within a working class which finally in some areas of the world is just beginning to shake off the weight of opportunism which subjugates it to the bourgeoisie, a working class barely beginning to defend itself on the immediate economic level and which has not yet posed the question of its physical self-defence? What must be done within a working class that is trying laboriously to rediscover the most elementary methods and instruments of class struggle, and to rebuild those organs of trade union resistance that a long period of counterrevolution has destroyed or profoundly deformed? What must be done to combat and liquidate little by little not only the influence of open class collaboration but also of reformism and its thousand «left» variants? What relationship can there be between the immediate struggle that the working class must conduct today on a still difficult and unfavourable terrain, and the party’s «armed organization» which can exist only in a phase of very high social tension[46], and only as a «military arm» of the political party? Is it possible to establish through these elementary struggles, through these first laborious steps, a real solidarity between workers, unemployed, and the utterly destitute, left to eke out a living in whatever marginal way, if we dazzle them with the unreal perspective of an imminent revolution? What should be our verdict of the Russian, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Vietnamese, or Albanian «socialisms», and of the «socialist» disguises of the revolutionary national-democratic movements, whose ideology is combined with the anarchist and Blanquist heritage present terrorist romanticism? Isn’t the class party indispensable not only for the seizure of power, but also in order to lead and exercise the proletarian dictatorship? Isn’t it necessary to reconstruct this party in the footsteps of an uninterrupted tradition, which the party in turn must restore to the working class whole and unaltered, relieved of all the deformations and aberrations accumulated from the right as well as from the «left»? And finally, what is communism, which so many people reduce to a poor copy of capitalism?.

All these problems and many more again remain open questions in what passes for the «revolutionary vanguard». Now if we wish to be able to march towards revolution, it is necessary to give these questions a clear and firm answer. Our present day terrorists know no more about revolution than their forebears. All they can say is that the state must be struck at its heart (or what they believe to be its heart), ignoring pure and simple the enormous, sometimes humble and not always spectacular, but essential tasks of revolutionary preparation.

To ignore these problems and these tasks, or to rely on the shock of wanton terror to resolve them, not only means evading the difficult and indispensable work of preparing the subjective conditions of the revolution, but in fact means idealising the state of programmatic and tactical disorganisation and disorientation in which the working class finds itself today. Not only, as Plekhanov said in 1884 (in his revolutionary period), does this amount to diverting «our attention from the most important point – the organisation of the working class for its struggle against its present and future enemies»[47], but it signifies denying the very necessity of this organisation. That is, it adds to the disorganisation accomplished by reformist opportunism its own disorganisation and its own amorphism which the noise of the revolutionary phrase and bursts of submachine gun fire cannot conceal.

As Trotsky very correctly wrote:
«In every class society there are enough contradictions so that a conspiracy can take root in its cracks… But a pure conspiracy even when victorious can only replace one clique of the same ruling class by another – or still less, merely alter the governmental personages. Only mass insurrection has ever brought the victory of one social regime over another… Now the masses advance and retreat several times before they make up their minds to the final assault»[48].

If we bear in mind that Trotsky said this of a period that was already pre-Revolutionary, we can see the hard and long work of preparation we have in front of us today. It is this difficult task that must be undertaken, and it is to this that we must devote the best of our energies. The revolutionary outcome will be the fruit of a long and arduous conquest, and not the result of a simple shove administered to the edifice of capitalism, still solid in spite of its undermined foundations.

Individualist terrorism refuses to enter on this road. It is in this refusal that its «folly» resides – and not in the advocacy of the historical necessity of violence, as our brave democrats rave, themselves always so ready to utilise it without restraint to defend bourgeois institutions. It is this refusal that condemns terrorism.

It is by no means a contradiction that the individualist idealism which characterises the doctrine and practice of romantic terrorism, both yesterday and today, attempts at a certain point in its trajectory to escape from the vicious circle of its real isolation and believes that it can «project itself into the mass movement», as stated for example in a resolution of the Red Brigades in February 1978. On the contrary, this attempt confirms its nature, for either it fantasises that it activates mass movements in order then to insert itself, or it pretends to be the «tip of the iceberg» of a movement already under way. In either case it only raises its congenital voluntarism to a higher level, the better to combine it with spontaneism. The terrorist dreams of organising «workers’ power in the factories, residential areas, and prisons» beginning right now, and of carrying out the role of a mailed fist of a military organisation placed at the disposal of this new power.

History repeats itself. In the summer of 1902, Lenin had to combat the Socialist-Revolutionaries:
«In their defence of terrorism, which the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement has so clearly proved to be ineffective, the Socialist-Revolutionaries are talking themselves blue in the face in asseverating that they recognise terrorism only in conjunction with work among the masses, and that therefore the arguments used by the Russian Social-Democrats to refute the efficacy of this method of struggle (and which have indeed been refuted for a long time to come) do not apply to them.»[49]

While exalting the episodes of armed «dueling» with the authorities, the Socialist-Revolutionaries proclaimed:
«We advocate terrorism not in place of work among the masses, but precisely for and simultaneous with that work».
Lenin’s answer is all the more instructive since he bases himself on a situation radically different from today’s. At that time the masses were practically on the verge of revolting. The serious problem posed for the revolution was to fill the void separating a mass movement on the rise and the fragility of an organisation unable – not, at this point, to lead – but to respond to its most elementary needs for orientation, organisation and political preparation in the broad sense. Now the «misunderstanding of the role of organisation and education» has always been for Lenin and Marxism one of the characteristic traits of anarchism. The economists, imprisoned within an immediatist vision of the movement, reduce the revolutionary tasks to a day to day intervention in economic struggles. The terrorists, «economists turned inside out», afflicted with an analogous disorder, limit these tasks to spectacular acts of brilliance. Both ignore the urgent needs, at once both modest and spectacular, of this movement to which they pretend to devote themselves. Both destroy the subjective conditions for the strengthening of the organ without which the movement is condemned to go around in circles, that is the class party.

Today we are experiencing the long-term effects of the social democratic and Stalinist counterrevolution, which make the rebirth of an authentic «mass movement» so difficult, and which above all bear down with a terrible weight on the reconstruction of the programmatic, tactical, and organisational foundations of the revolutionary class party. Consequently Lenin’s words, written in a period of enormous social tension, when the fabric of the future Party of October was being woven, have an even greater relevance, today.

«[The Socialist-Revolutionaries] mistake, as we have already pointed out on numerous occasions, consists in the failure to understand the basic defect of our movement… At a time when the revolutionaries are short of the forces and means to lead the masses, who are already rising, an appeal to resort to such terrorist acts as the organisation of attempts on the lives of ministers by individuals and groups that are not known to one another means not only thereby breaking off work among the masses, but also introducing downright disorganisation into that work».

And in his customary manner of considering the most arduous theoretical questions from the point of view of party work, Lenin explained:
«Anyone who really carries on his revolutionary work in conjunction with the class struggle of the proletariat very well knows, sees and feels what vast numbers of immediate and direct demands of the proletariat (and of the sections of the people capable of supporting the latter) remain unsatisfied. He knows that in very many places, throughout vast areas, the working people are literally straining to go into action, and that their ardour runs to waste because of the scarcity of literature and leadership, the lack of forces and means in the revolutionary organisations. And we find ourselves – we see that we find ourselves – in the same old vicious circle that has so long hemmed in the Russian revolution like an omen of evil. On the one hand, the revolutionary ardour of the insufficiently enlightened and unorganised crowd runs to waste. On the other hand, shots fired by the ‹elusive individuals› who are losing faith in the possibility of marching in formation and working hand in hand with the masses also end in smoke.»[50]

This is why (as we pointed out above) Lenin opposed the «facile repetition of what has already been condemned by the very past forms of the movement» to «what the future possesses», the «future forms of the movement». This is why, declaring «a determined and relentless war on the Socialist-Revolutionaries», he wrote, among other things:
«No verbal assurances and vows can disprove the unquestionable fact that present-day terrorism, as practised and advocated by the Socialist Revolutionaries, is not connected in any way with work among the masses, for the masses, or together with the masses; that the organisation of terroristic acts by the Party distracts our very scanty organisational forces from their difficult and by no means completed task of organising a revolutionary workers’ party; that in practice the terrorism of the SocialistRevolutionaries is nothing else than single combat, a method that has been wholly condemned by the experience of history. Even foreign socialists are beginning to become embarrassed by the noisy advocacy of terrorism advanced today by our Socialist-Revolutionaries. Among the masses of the Russian workers this advocacy simply sows harmful illusions, such as the idea that terrorism ‹compels people to think politically, even against their will›» («Revolutsionnaya Rossiya», № 7, p. 4), or that «more effectively than months of verbal propaganda it is capable of changing the views… of thousands of people with regard to the revolutionaries and the meaning [!!] of their activity», or that it is capable of «infusing new strength into the waverers, those discouraged and shocked by the sad outcome of many demonstrations» (ibid.), and so on. These harmful illusions can only bring about «early disappointment and weaken the work of preparing the masses for the onslaught upon the autocracy»[51]
… or today upon the bourgeois democratic state.

The present day terrorists perhaps believe that they have rallied to Lenin’s position because they utilise one of his formulae, that of the «fighting party». Does this really reflect a recognition on their part of the fundamental necessity of the party, and should we see here the indication of a qualitative change in the theory and programme of individualist terrorism? Obviously this is not the case at all, and these people utilise Lenin’s expression completely out of context.

In the Marxist conception (not «revised and corrected» by Lenin as some would say, but simply developed in all its explicit and implicit ramifications), the class party, the political party, from its birth contains inscribed in its programme, whose essence is immutable, the fact that its sole function as the political «organisation of the proletariat into a class» is to prepare the qualitative leap towards «its organisation into a ruling class», in other words the preparation of the revolutionary seizure of power. This implies the armed insurrection and the dictatorship exercised over the defeated classes by the victorious power led by the party, as much to break the internal and external resistance of the bourgeoisie as to carry on, when objective conditions permit, the by definition international struggle against capitalism on the level of a revolutionary war. The party moreover, knows that this goal cannot be attained and this preparation cannot be realised except on the condition that in the entire period preceding the revolutionary situation it not only has carried out the complex whole of activities of propaganda, proselytism, agitation, organisation, intervention in worker’s struggles, etc., which characterise the party, but also that it continues to assume them all (in different proportions) during the revolutionary situation. Only in this way, in fact, will it be able to respond to the proletariat’s needs for organisation and political preparation, by dint of which it has appeared and which define it as a class party.

«At the time of the civil war», writes Lenin in the article on guerrilla warfare quoted above, «the ideal of the party of the proletariat is the fighting party». Precisely, at the time of the civil war! Not at just any time, not in just any situation which the reveries or the will of certain people decree to be a situation of civil war. The party only becomes a «fighting party» when the «mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly long intervals occur between the ‹big engagements› of the insurrection»; when, in order to prevent the movement from being frayed in the disintegration and the demoralisation implicit in its generous spontaneity, so lacking in orientation, the party must demonstrate that it is capable of leading it. If the party then becomes the «fighting party» it is because it has been preparing itself for a long time for the need to acquire its «military arm», a task which is not adapted to any situation or practical at any time. But in no case can the party be confused with its military arm, nor be reduced to that. If it is a «fighting party» this is because it has long since learned how to fight and because «in time of civil war» it is ready to use the appropriate means, i. e. military ones, and to lead the proletariat on this level of struggle. But it never considers these means as «the only or even as the chief method of struggle»; on the contrary, «this method must be subordinated to other methods… it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism»[52].

Thus it utilises these means by framing them in a strategical and tactical plan which never permits the political party to be transformed into a more or less tight network of «brigades», nor into any sort of «army». Quite the opposite, this plan necessitates that, in the period of civil war, the political party construct its own military apparatus, rigorously subordinated to the objectives, program, organisational network, and tactical decisions of the party. It requires that the party prepare in advance the subjective conditions for the formation of this apparatus, and not permit itself to be stopped, when the moment arrives, by the inevitable manifestations of «disorganisation» brought about by the transition to any wartime action and «any new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices». These unavoidable troubles nevertheless will be less serious to the extent that party militants are better prepared to meet them and to the extent that the party as a whole has conquered the sympathy and support of increasingly broad layers of the class in the course of work executed with tenacity and continuity on a terrain and with methods which are not and cannot yet be military.

This party, whose «military arm» is only an instrument – and an auxiliary, technical, and rigorously subordinate instrument – does not amuse itself by «choosing clandestinity» (as is said in the typically voluntarist phraseology of romanticist terrorism) even if it foresees that it will be compelled at a certain moment of its trajectory to live an underground existence. Moreover it does not fall into the idealist error that presents clandestinity as mechanically synonymous with armed struggle or military action, even if it foresees that in the crucial phase of the insurrection, clandestine action will become one – but only one – of its principal modes of action. On the contrary, then it will not cease to develop by illegal means all the activities that characterised its former «legal» life, just as in normal times it must apply itself to weaving a more or less rigid clandestine network, not as an alternate to the open and avowed party network, but as its necessary complement, its indispensable system of defence.

In short, the party does not believe that its permanent task – which consists in organising and orienting the masses in order to be able to lead them, and which it will have to pursue even after the end of the civil war and after the conquest of power – can be reduced to what is only one of its phases, a phase which is particularly delicate to be sure, but consequently also one which needs most to be politically controlled, and one which is the most limited in time.

What can an organisation which acts according to these criteria have in common with the «fighting party» advocated by the Blanquist type terrorists? The latter raise to the level of the party what for Marxism is only one of the instruments of the party, an instrument from which it requires above all a political as well as organisational discipline and obedience, because it is only on this condition that the party will be able to entrust it, at zero hour, with a function of temporary command in a specific sector[53].

For Marxism, the party organ is not a mechanical product of the spontaneous class movement (as all the spontaneist pretend), much less can it be born from a movement reduced to the expression of military commandos on a very small scale, as the present day brigadists would have it, It does not make up its program from one day to the next collecting up all the so-called new theories. It does not make its organisation dependent on the real or imaginary expectations of the moment. It does not subordinate its tactical plan to the immediate attractions of the moment. Its ability to lead the real movement – which it does not create, whose moment of birth it cannot decide, just as it cannot determine the increasingly varied forms in which its manifold requirements will manifest themselves – depends upon its ability to precede it. It depends on its capacity to foresee the final outcome as well as the road that leads to it, the phases it will have to traverse on this long route, the means that will have to be employed each in their turn, none of which excludes the others, even when one may occupy the foreground.

The party has this capacity because it possesses a theory and programme which show the way forward on the revolutionary path to the extent that they embody interests and objectives which do not correspond to one isolated phase of the movement but which go beyond objectives which might seem essential to members of the class taken individually, and even to the class as a whole, at particular moments in its history. In short, the party must be the point of departure in order to be able to be the decisive lever in the process of the emancipation of the working class. The military apparatus, on the other hand, a vital organ in the insurrection, but neither sufficient in itself nor autonomous, can only be one of the higher stages on the ascending scale of the revolution, never its point of departure.

This is why Lenin, in «What Is to Be Done?» shows that the apparently opposed phenomena of economism and terrorism are the two faces of the same coin, which bears the name: submission to spontaneity. Consequently, he writes:
«It would be a grievous error indeed to build the Party organisation in anticipation only of outbreaks and street fighting, or only upon the forward march of the drab everyday struggle. We must always conduct our everyday work and always be prepared for every situation, because very frequently it is almost impossible to foresee when a period of outbreak will give way to a period of calm. In the instances, however, when it is possible to do so, we could not turn this foresight to account for the purpose of reconstructing our organisation; for in an autocratic country these changes take place with astonishing rapidity, being sometimes connected with a single night raid by the tsarist janizaries. And the revolution itself must not by any means be regarded as a single act (as the Nadezhdins apparently imagine), but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less complete calm. For that reason, the principal content of the activity of our Party organisation, the focus of this activity, should be work that is both possible and essential in the period of a most powerful outbreak as well as in the period of complete calm, namely, work of political agitation, connected throughout Russia, illuminating all aspects of life, and conducted among the broadest possible strata of the masses.»[54]

Thus Lenin points not to the gun or the bomb as the principal instrument of the party, but to the instrument of education and political organisation constituted by the party newspaper, the vehicle of the principles, program, and the tactical plan – those imperatives to which each particular means of struggle is and must remain subordinated. Around this instrument will be formed the organisational network which, precisely,
«will be ready for everything, from upholding the honour, the prestige, and the continuity of the Party in periods of acute revolutionary depression to preparing for, appointing the time for, and carrying out the nation-wide armed uprising»[55].

Thus the «duty to create organisations [in periods of high social tension] best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters» and, when «the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war…, not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war» – this duty is not entrusted to just any organisation born as an immediate expression of the struggle or the will to struggle, armed or not. It is entrusted by Lenin to the revolutionary class party[56], the physical not metaphysical embodiment of the theory, program, and traditions of struggle of a century of the worker’s movement.

It is only in this perspective that we have the right and the duty to struggle for the «fighting party». Those who do not share this view only fight for fantasies born of their own voluntarism, and in this way they disorganise and disorientate the very «mass movement» they pretend to glorify.

The Bolsheviks were rigorously faithful to this global vision, one neither narrow nor short term, of the role of the party in the proletarian revolution and in the preparation for it. This is what enabled them not only to give the signal for the insurrection in October 1917, which would have been insufficient in itself, but also to lead it and carry it through to victory.

From February to October, the Party underwent all the phases of its development, fulfilled all its tasks, pushed its propaganda, its agitation, its efforts to organise the proletariat in all directions. Far from being satisfied with its minority position, it tried to overcome this by working in the ranks of the class, both «underground» and «above ground», in street demonstrations as well as in economic battles, in the audacious attacks of moments of offensive as well as in the prudent operations in times of retreat or defence. It worked on, concentrating its attention not on its own wishes or impatience but on the real aspirations and profound needs of the masses, always applying itself to urging the movement ahead, even if it entailed rejecting from its own ranks any «tailists» who where prone to remaining in tow of the movement. This is the activity that characterises the «fighting party», and not its parody served up with urban guerrilla sauce. It is this party activity which produced that «masterpiece of the military art», the October insurrection. It is thanks to this that October was simultaneously the burial of individualist terrorism and the most sublime exaltation of class violence and terror.

Throughout this study we have endeavoured to re-establish the dialectical series which alone enables us to reaffirm the revolutionary substance of Marxism in the face of the bleatings of democracy and its priests in the workers movement, though without attenuating the century old critique of romantic terrorism. We know no better way of concluding than by quoting the pages where Trotsky, in full agreement with Lenin in his letters to the Central Committee on and before the eve of October, restores conspiracy to its proper place, gives it to the proletariat as one of its indispensable weapons.

After having underlined the enormous difference that exists between «the deliberate undertaking of a minority» and «insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of its events» and which no more than the revolution as a whole, can «be evoked at will», Trotsky writes:
«This does not mean, however, that popular insurrection and conspiracy are in all circumstances mutually exclusive. An element of conspiracy almost always enters to some degree into any insurrection. Being historically conditioned by a certain stage in the growth of a revolution, a mass insurrection is never purely spontaneous. Even when it flashes out unexpectedly to a majority of its own participants, it has been fertilised by those ideas in which the insurrectionaries see a way out of the difficulties of existence, But a mass insurrection can be foreseen and prepared. It can be organised in advance. In this case the conspiracy is subordinate to the insurrection, serves it, smoothes its path, hastens its victory. The higher the political level of a revolution movement and the more serious its leadership, the greater will be the place occupied by conspiracy in a popular insurrection…
To overthrow the old power is one thing; to take the power in one’s own hands is another. The bourgeoisie may win the power in a revolution not because it is revolutionary, but because it is bourgeois. It has in its possession property, education, the press, a network of strategic positions, a hierarchy of institutions. Quite otherwise with the proletariat. Deprived in the nature of things of all social advantages, an insurrectionary proletariat can count only on its numbers, its solidarity, its cadres, its official staff.
Just as a blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power; it has to have an organisation accommodated to this task. The co-ordination of the mass insurrection with the conspiracy, the subordination of the conspiracy to the insurrection, the organisation of the insurrection through the conspiracy, constitutes that complex and responsible department of revolutionary politics which Marx and Engels called the art of insurrection. It presupposes a correct general leadership of the masses, a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautioussness in, technical preparation, and a daring blow…
The social democrats… do not reject revolution at large as a social catastrophe, any more than they reject earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, eclipses and epidemics of the plague. What they do reject – calling it ‹Blanquism›, or still worse, Bolshevism – is the conscious preparation of an overturn, the plan, the conspiracy…
From his observations and reflections upon the failure of the many insurrections he witnessed or took part in, Auguste Blanqui derived a number of tactical rules which if violated will make the victory of any insurrection extremely difficult, if not impossible. Blanqui demanded these things: a timely creation of correct revolutionary detachments, their centralised command and adequate equipment, a well calculated placement of barricades, their definite construction, and a systematic, not a mere episodic, defence of them, All these rules, deriving from the military problems of the insurrection, must of course change with social conditions and military technique, but in themselves they are not by any means Blanquism in the sense that this word approaches the German putschism, or revolutionary adventurism.
Insurrection is an art, and like all arts it has its laws, The rules of Blanqui were the demands of a military revolutionary realism, Blanqui’s mistake lay not in his direct but his inverse theorem, From the fact that tactical weakness condemns an insurrection to defeat, Blanqui inferred that an observance of the rules of insurrectionary tactics would itself guarantee the victory. Only from this point on is it legitimate to contrast Blanquism with Marxism. Conspiracy does not take the place of insurrection. An active minority of the proletariat, no matter how well organised, cannot seize the power regardless of the general conditions of the country. In this point history has condemned Blanquism. But only in this. His affirmative theorem retains all its force. In order to conquer the power, the proletariat needs more than a spontaneous insurrection, It needs a suitable organisation, it needs a plan; it needs a conspiracy.»[57]

It is for all these reasons, which form an indivisible whole, that a revolutionary class party is needed, solidly rooted in the Soviets, in the trade unions, in the factory councils, etc., armed with its military apparatus, but not subordinated to any of these organs. And Trotsky continues in these terms, which correspond to the fundamental positions of our current:
«Thanks to a favourable combination of historic conditions both domestic and international, the Russian proletariat was headed by a party of extraordinary political clarity and unexampled revolutionary temper. Only this permitted that small and young class to carry out a historic task of unprecedented proportions. It is indeed the general testimony of history – the Paris Commune, the German and Austrian revolutions of 1918, the soviet revolution in Hungary and Bavaria, the Italian revolution of 1919, the German crisis of 1923, the Chinese revolution of 1925–27, the Spanish revolution of 1931 – that up to now the weakest link in the chain of necessary conditions has been the party. The hardest thing of all is for the working-class to create a revolutionary organisation capable of rising to the height of its historic task. In the older and more civilised countries powerful forces work toward the weakening and demoralisation of the revolutionary vanguard. An important constituent part of this work is the struggle of the social democrats against Blanquism, by which name they designate the revolutionary essence of Marxism».

An enormous task awaits communists: to struggle against the forces of social-democratic, and today above all, Stalinist, origin, while preventing the erroneous reaction, the ideology which denies the centralising function of the party, from rising to its feet again.

It is for this reason that, while laying bare the inconsistency of the «negative side» of terrorist Blanquism and all its variants, we call upon young proletarians to struggle with the utmost energy against the false illusions of reformist gradualism, against the opportunist plague, without falling into the sterile and impotent dreams of individualist terrorism. We call upon them to struggle in order that the revolutionary contents of Marxism can appear in broad daylight; in order that the link in the chain of necessary conditions for revolution, the Marxist political party, which in the advanced countries has proved to be the weakest link up to now, may strengthen itself and manifest itself with all its vigour; in order that the proletarian revolution may be reborn from the convergence and interaction of the party with the spontaneous insurrection of forces born from the volcano of economic and social life, and in order that, instead of being nipped in the bud once again, it may seize victory.

Notes:
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1. See in particular, in English, «Terrorism and Communism: On the Events in Germany», in issue № 4 of this review. In French see our pamphlet «Violence, terrorisme et lutte de classe», which is a collection of articles from our press and leaflets distributed by the party; also see the articles «L’idéologie des Brigades Rouges» and «Critique du romantisme terroriste» in nos. 264 and 265 of «Le Prolétaire», our French language newspaper. [⤒]

2. «Guerrilla Warfare» (1906), «Collected Works», Vol. 11, pp. 219–220. The long quote we use a little further on is found on pp. 213–214. [⤒]

3. It is necessary to understand the exact sense of this: neither on plot or on a party, insofar as revolutionary situations are not created at will. The author of these words (Lenin, «Marxism and Insurrection», 26/27-9-1917, «Collected Works», Vol. 26, p. 22) is also the one who relentlessly explained to the hesitant comrades that once these objective conditions are realised, the intervention of the party is indispensable in order to orientate the movement and enable it to be organised in a cohesive way. He was also the one who showed the necessity for a special clandestine, conspiratorial, military organ of the party charged with the practical tasks of applying this «art of insurrection». Consequently, it is not enough to say that Marxists reject Blanquism. They reject the conspiratorial plot elevated to an absolute and supra-historic schema but they themselves must use conspiratorial methods. We will come to this point later on when we follow the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and the history of the Bolshevik Party on the eve of Red October. [⤒]

4. Not to mention taking hostages, the execution of spies or provocateurs, or actions to free political prisoners, etc. We will return to this point later. [⤒]

5. «Guerrilla Warfare», op. cit., p. 224. This question is dealt with great detail in «The Objectives of the Detachments of the Revolutionary Army» (1905), «Collected Works», vol. 5. [⤒]

6. A wing of the Italian Socialist Party led by Serrati. [⤒]

7. «While the ‹Peacemaking Expedition› Is Being Prepared», an article published in «Il Comunista», 31-7-1921. [⤒]

8. «Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League», 1850. [⤒]

9. This «Draft Program of Action» was published in its entirety in № 67 of «Programme Communiste», our French language theoretical review. The passage quoted above can be found on p. 57. [⤒]

10. As usual, all this clamouring (especially on the part of Paul Levi) was accompanied by warnings against the danger of the party compromising with the sub proletariat (the Lumpenproletariat) and badly used quotes from Marx and Engels. In 1906, Lenin had already responded to such protestations:
    «It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riffraff. That is true. But it only means that the Party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be enabled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted, and prostituted» («Guerrilla Warfare», op. cit., p. 224). [⤒]

11. «Party and Class Action», published in Rassegna Comunista, 31-5-1921. Translated in our booklet, «Party and Class». [⤒]

12. It can be objected that in the individualist type of terrorism, we are dealing with a strategy rather than a tactic. However, it is important not to forget that Lenin wrote these words during a period of all-out imperialist war and in the hypothesis not only of a revolutionary situation but of a revolutionary strategy based on the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. It is from this viewpoint that the tactical tasks of the proletarian and communist vanguard had to be correctly defined. As for the individual or collective terror, they had to be seen from the standpoint of linking them with the actions of the mass of proletarians and exploited in general and not from the standpoint of «exemplary acts». [⤒]

13. «Speech at the Congress of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party», Zürich, Nov. 4, 1916, «Collected Works», Vol. 5, pp. 123–124. [⤒]

14. In Lenin’s brief speech from which we have quoted above, he spoke of «street demonstrations», which is something that is already on a higher level than the immediate struggles of the working class. But we already have seen and we will see again further on that he is envisioning here also more modest and sporadic actions, beginning with strike pickets which are also an elementary defensive form of violence.
    In «Tasks of the Left Zimmerwaldists in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party», written some months later, Lenin illustrated the work of propaganda and agitation which needed to be developed in all areas in order to lead the masses to a position of revolutionary defeatism. He emphasised that «Social-Democratic groups must be formed in all military units» of the army; and that «the historical inevitability and legitimacy, from the standpoint of socialism, of using arms in the only legitimate war, namely the proletarian war against the bourgeoisie to liberate humanity from wage-slavery, must be explained». When he spoke of making «propaganda against isolated terrorist actions» it was in order to «link up the struggle of the revolutionary sector of the army with the broad movement of the proletariat and of the exploited population generally». Finally, he called for more intensive propaganda «urging soldiers to refuse to obey when troops are used against strikers» and explaining that «passive disobedience alone is not enough». («Collected Works», Vol. 11, p. 144). [⤒]

15. «‹Left-Wing› Communism – An Infantile Disorder», «Collected Works», Vol. 31, p. 32. [⤒]

16. Lenin, «Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats», «Collected Works», Vol. 2, pp. 340 and 329. The term «social-democrat» of course was at the time synonymous with «socialist» or «communist». [⤒]

17. «Collected Works», Vol. 4, pp. 367 and 369–371 (underlined by us). [⤒]

18. «Collected Works», Vol. 5, pp. 19–20. [⤒]

19. «Collected Works», Vol. 5, pp. 417–421. [⤒]

20. «Collected Works», Vol. 5, pp. 512 and 476–477 (last sentence underlined by us). [⤒]

21. «Revolutionary Adventurism», «Collected Works», Vol. 6, pp. 194–195 (middle section underlined by us). [⤒]

22. «Collected Works», Vol. 9, pp. 283–284 (the last third underlined by us). [⤒]

23. See «Communist Program» no. 5. On this subject see also «Terrorism and Communism: On the Events in Germany» in «Communist Program» no. 4. [⤒]

24. «Draft Resolution on the Attitude of the RSDLP Towards the Armed Uprising», Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 68. Whereas today the Social Democratic parties are merely degenerated reformists, we must remind that at Lenin’s time the term Social-Democracy was used to denote the Marxist Party. [⤒]

25. Preface to «Two Tactics of the Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution» (1905), «Collected Works», Vol. 9, p. 18. [⤒]

26. «Should We Organise the Revolution», Feb. 21, 1905, «Collected Works», Vol. 8, p. 172 [⤒]

27. «The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising», Aug. 29, 1905, «Collected Works», Vol.9, p.203. In order to avoid giving the term «revolutionary» army a banal «technical» meaning, Lenin specifies in another passage:
    «a military force, the military force of the revolutionary people (and not the people in general), consisting of
    1) the armed proletariat and peasantry,
    2) organised advance detachments of representatives of these classes, and
    3) sections of the army that are prepared to come over to the side of the people.
    It is all this taken together that constitutes a revolutionary army» («The Latest in Iskra Tactics», Oct. 17, 1905, «Collected Works», Vol. 9, pp. 366–7). [⤒]

28. «The Latest in Iskra Tactics», op. cit.. pp. 367–9 (our emphasis). [⤒]

29. «The Dissolution of the Duma and the Tasks of the Proletariat», July. 1906, «Collected Works», vol. II, pp. 124–6. [⤒]

30. «Lessons of the Moscow Uprising», Aug. 29, 1906, «Collected Works», vol. Il, p. 174–6. [⤒]

31. Lenin, «Collected Works», vol. 11, p. 176–7. We have emphasised the sentences where Lenin gives the keystone of the Marxist view of the use of violence and terror in the revolutionary struggle. [⤒]

32. The text, published on March 29, 1906, is to be found in the «Collected Works», Vol. 10, pp. 153–4 (our emphasis). [⤒]

33. In «La Plèbe» of Jan, 22, 1878 and March 21, 1879. This passage is translated from the Italian language collection of Marx’s and Engel’s writings entitled «India, Cina, Russia» (Milan, 1965), pp. 232–3. [⤒]

34. Engels to Vera Zasulich, April 23. 1885, in Marx-Engels, «Selected Correspondence». (Moscow, third edition), 1975, p. 362. [⤒]

35. Marx, «Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Colognes» (1853); In Marx-Engels, «The Cologne Communist Trial», (London, 1971), p. 62. [⤒]

36. Engels, «A few words on the History of the Communist Leagues», (1885), in Marx, «Selected Works», vol. 2, (London, 1942), pp. 23–4. [⤒]

37. Marx, «Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna», «Neue Rheinische Zeitung», № 136, Nov. 1848, and «Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung», no. 301, May 19, 1849, in Marx-Engels, «Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung». 1848–49, (Moscow, 1972), pp. 149 and 254. [⤒]

38. Marx-Engels, «Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League» (March I850), in Karl Marx, «Political Writings». Vol. 1: «The Revolution of 1848». p. 326. [⤒]

39. On the eve of the October Revolution Lenin would quote this page from Engels extensively. See «Germany: Revolution and Counterrevolution» in Engels, «The German Revolution» (Chicago, 1967), p. 227. [⤒]

40. Marx to Louis Watteau, November 10, 1861, in Marx-Engels, «Correspondence», Moscow, 1971, p. 120. [⤒]

41. Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, April 12, 1871, in Marx-Engels, «Selected Correspondence», op. cit., p. 247. [⤒]

42. Marx, «The Civil War in France», in Marx, «Political Writings» Vol. 3, «The First International and After», 1974, pp. 228–29. [⤒]

43. Engels, «On Authority» (1873), in Marx-Engels, «Selected Works», Vol. I (Moscow, 1962), p.369). [⤒]

44. Lenin, «Anarchism and Socialism», 1901, «Collected Works», Vol. 5, p. 327. [⤒]

45. Engels, «On Social Conditions in Russia» (1875) in «The Russian Menace to Europe», P. W. Blackstock ed., (1953), p. 214. [⤒]

46. This of course does not exclude the task of self defence which can be posed in any period. [⤒]

47. Plekhanov, «Our Differences» (1884) in «Selected Philosophical Works», Vol 1, (Moscow), p. 181. [⤒]

48. Trotsky, «History of the Russian Revolution», Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 167. Let us make it clear that we quote Trotsky here as a member of the Bolshevik party, as the founder of the Red Army and as an opponent to Stalin’s counterrevolutionary theory, of «Socialism in one country». This in no way means that we can defend all of Trotsky’s positions or that our current has anything to do with Trotskyism today. [⤒]

49. Lenin, «Revolutionary Adventurism», «Collected Works», Vol. 6, p. 189. [⤒]

50. Lenin, «Revolutionary Adventurism», «Collected Works», Vol. 6, pp. 192–6. [⤒]

51. Lenin, «Why the Social-Democrats Must Declare a Determined and Relentless War on the Socialist-Revolutionaries», «Collected Works». Vol. 6, p. 175. [⤒]

52. Lenin, «Guerrilla Warfare», «Collected Works», Vol. 11, p. 221. [⤒]

53. Hence the «revolutionary military committee» of October was a magnificent technicopolitical instrument of the Bolshevik party, which received its orders from the party and was responsible to it. Nobody, least of all Trotsky, would ever have thought of raising it to the level of a substitute for the party. [⤒]

54. Lenin, «What is To Be Done», «Collected Works», Vol. 5, p. 514. [⤒]

55. Lenin, What is To Be Done, Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 5 14-S. [⤒]

56. Lenin, «Guerrilla Warfare», «Collected Works», Vol. 11, p. 221. [⤒]

57. This quote and the following (our emphasis) are taken from the chapter of the «History of the Russian Revolution» entitled «The Art of Insurrection», Vol. 3, pp. 167. It is clear that with the seizure of power a new chapter is opened, that of the red terror in the course of the civil war and the dictatorship. We remind the reader that Trotsky dealt with this question exhaustively and with a formidable dialectical strength in his «Terrorism and Communism». [⤒]