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Leon Trotsky TERRORISITI & Leon Trotsky TERRORISITI & [ommunism with a preface and an introduction by Leon Trotsky and a foreword by Max Shachtman Ann Arbor Paperbacks Terrorism and Communism A Reply to Karl Kautsky by LEON TROTSKY FOREWORD BY MAX SHACHTMAN With FRANCE AT A TURNING POINT and INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION BY LEON TROTSKY Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Communism and Marxism The University of Michigan Press First edition as an Ann Arbor Paperback 1961 Foreword and translation of Trotsky Preface to French edition by Max Shachtman copyright © by The University of Michigan 1961 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Ambassador Books Limited Manufactured in the United States of America Terrorism and Communism was originally published in this country as Dictatorship vs. Democracy and in Great Britain as The Defence of Terrorism. Foreword to the New Edition By MAX SHACHTMAN Trotsky's work should be paired with a somewhat earlier work by Lenin which had much the same theme and purpose. The two were probably the most important and, in the Communist move­ ment of the time, the most influential polemical defenses of the Bolshevik course in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and both were aimed at the severe critique of Bolshevism by its best-known socialist adversary, Karl Kautsky. The first shot fired at the Bolsheviks by Kautsky in the sum­ mer of 1918, The Dictato1'Ship of the Proletariat, drew a reply from Lenin at the end of the same year. The temper of the rebuttal may be judged from its title, The Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky. Despite urgings by some of his friends to desist, Kautsky resumed the attack the next summer in his Terror­ ism and Communism. Trotsky used the same title for his answer­ the present work-written a year later, then translated into several languages and widely distributed, above all in Communist ranks.* To this Kautsky replied in turn in 192 1 in his From Democracy to State-Slavery, and in similar writings for years thereafter. The choice of main target for the Bolshevik barrage was not ac­ cidental. The leaders of the Russian socialist opposition to the Bol­ sheviks-the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionists-were very little known to the mass of the socialist movement outside of Russia ; their writings were even less well known. The position of Kautsky was altogether different. Karl Kautsky had known both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in his youth. After their death, he became the principal literary executor of the two founders of modern socialism. His writings on * The American edition, published in New York in 1922 by the American Communists (Workers Party), bore the inaccurate title, Dictatorship vs. Democracy, a misnomer which considerably annoyed Trotsky. v vi a wide variety of subjects were regarded everywhere as classical statements of the socialist view. He virtually founded and for thirty-five years edited the theoretical organ of the German So­ cial Democracy, Die Neue Zeit, and it is no exaggeration to say that no other periodical had so profound an influence upon the whole generation of Marxists before World War I, not in Ger­ many alone but throughout the world. In his own party and in the Socialist (the Second) International for most of its quarter of a century before the war brought about its collapse, he was unique in the prestige and authority in the sphere of Marxian theory that he enjoyed among socialists of all schools. His renown was scarcely diminished, at least up to the outbreak of the war, by occasional questioning of his Marxian orthodoxy by the small but more radi­ cal wing of socialism or by the fact that the actual political leader­ shir of his party shifted steadily away from him. It is worth not­ ing, too, that except for the Poles and of course the Russians, no one in the international socialist movement showed a greater interest, knowledge, and understanding of Russian problems under Tsarism and of the Russian socialist movement than Kautsky. The Russian IVlarxists of all tendencies held Kautsky in almost awe­ some esteem. Up to August 1914, the writings of Lenin in particu­ lar are studded with the most respectful and even laudatory refer­ ences to Kautsky� with whose views he sought to associate himself as much as possible and whose approval he, Lenin, adduced when­ ever he could as a most authoritative contribution to Russian so­ cialist controversies. The International foundered in the war. Most of the socialist parties of the belligerent countries supported their respective gov­ ernments, among them the majority of the leaders and members of the German Social Democracy. This position Lenin denounced furiously as a betrayal of socialist principle and of earlier decisions of the Socialist International. A socialist minority opposed sup­ port of the war. In Germany the minority ranged from the ex­ treme left, represented by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxem­ burg, to a more moderate, more-or-less pacifist wing represented by Hugo Haase and supported by Kautsky. This wing (and Kaut­ sky in particular) was no less furiously assailed by Lenin for its ((Centrism," its heterogeneity of thought and action, its concilia­ tory attitude toward the majority, its failure to orient toward un­ compromising revolutionary struggle, and especially for its refusal vii to organize a new, clear-cut revolutionary party of its own and a new socialist International, the Third International toward which Lenin strove from the beginning of 1915. By 1917 the antagonism between majority and minority in the German Social Democracy reached the splitting point. The latter, with Kautsky's support, organized a new party, the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD ) in protest against the war policy of the ma­ jority and against its arbitrary actions toward the minority inside the party (Kautsky, for example, was in effect ousted from the editorship of Die Neue Zeit and replaced by a partisan of the majority, Heinrich Cunow). The schism did not moderate Lenin's attacks upon Kautsky. They were, if anything, intensified. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia later the same year and Kautsky, not unexpected­ ly, promptly came forward as their opponent on an international scale, so to say, the breach between them became wide and deep and irreparable. From the very beginning of the revolution, the Bolsheviks sought the active support of socialists outside of Russia, not only as sympathizers of the revolution they had already carried out but for the world revolution which was to be led by the Communist (the Third) International which they proposed to establish as quickly as possible. The opposition of a socialist of Kautsky's standing was therefore a matter of exceptional concern. Hence the vehemence, the intensity, and extensiveness, of Lenin's and Trot­ sky's polemics, of which the present work is an outstanding example. Trotsky'S defense of Bolshevism is devoted to two basic ques­ tions. One is the question of the revolutionary seizure of power to establish and maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet form, the kind of party required for this purpose and the role it must play in achieving it. The other is the question of the methods to be pursued by a socialist revolution in realizing so­ cialism, that is, in reorganizing the economic foundation of so­ ciety. Although the questions are distinctive, they were intimately related in Trotsky's mind. They proved to be not less closely re­ lated in the reality of the following years. On the first question, Trotsky did not waver in any essential aspect of his views from the day he set them down to the day his life was brought so cruelly to an end. He reaffirmed them in 1936 viii when he wrote a new preface to the French edition and on more than one occasion before then and afterward. In the period in which he wrote his work, the position of the Bolsheviks in the in­ ternational socialist movement, particularly in Europe where it had its predominant strength, was gaining influence at a rate which was all the more extraordinary when compared with the nearly complete isolation of Lenin's group even among the European left wing during the war. Trotsky, like Lenin, of course, aimed at ad­ vancing and consolidating this position. In pursuing this aim, the Bolsheviks were impelled by the most urgent considerations. Primary and basic was this one : while they believed that special circumstances had made Russia ripe for a socialist revolution-the seizure of power-the same Russia was not at all ripe for the establishment of a socialist society. That achievement was excluded in general by the principle that social­ ism requires the collaborative efforts of the economically most ad­ vanced countries and in particular by the fact that Russia was not even one of the advanced countries but rather one of the most backward. The European revolution was therefore regarded by all Bolsheviks as the only salvation of the Russian revolution. The success of this wider revolution was, in turn, dependent upon the quickest possible formation of parties in the West cast in the mold of the Bolshevik party, which meant above all other things parties sharply divided from the then dominant right and center wings and from their theoretical, political, and organizational positions. The other urgent consideration was this : the prewar socialist international had not yet been reconstituted, whereas the Com­ munist International had already been formally founded at its first world congress in Moscow in "March 1919. But the new Interna­ tional was still more a prospect than a reality, for its first congress represented little more than the Bolshevik party.
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