Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky

237 Pages·2007·4.574 MB·English

by  Leon Trotsky, Slavoj Žižek

TERRORISM AND
COMMUNISM:
A REPLY TO KARL KAUTSKY
LEON TROTSKY
FOREWORD BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK
PREFACE BY H.N. BRAILSFORD
VERSO
London • New York
First published as Dictatorship vs Democracy by the Workers Party of America 1920
This edition published by Verso 2007
©Verso 2007
Foreword © Slavoj Zizek 2007
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-178-6
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Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Courier Stoughton Inc.
CONTENTS
Foreword by S/ovoj Lizek vii
Selected Further Reading xxxiii
Glossary of Names xxxv
Chronology
Preface by H.N. Brailsford 3
Introduction 9
The Balance of Power 15
2 The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 23
3 Democracy 31
4 Terrorism 49
5 The Paris Commune and Soviet Russia 68
6 Marx and ... Kautsky. 88
7 The Working Class and its Soviet Policy 94
8 Problems of the Organization of Labour 121
9 Karl Kautsky, his School and his Book 165
In Place of an Epilogue 175
Notes 179

FOREWORD
Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism, or,
Despair and Utopia in the Turbulent Year of 1920
By S/avoj Litek
Karl Kraus, the Viennese cultural critic and chronicler (author, among
other things, of the famous claim that psychoanalysis is itself the disease
it tries to cure), knew of Trotsky from the latter's sijour in Vienna
before the First World War. One of the legends about Kraus is that,
in the early 1920s, when he was told that Trotsky saved the October
Revolution by organizing the Red Army, he exclaimed: 'Who would
have expected that of Herr Bronstein from Cafe Central!' This remark
relies on the transubstantiation in the style of the famous anecdote
on Zhuang-Tze and the butterfly: it was not Trotsky, the great
revolutionary, who, during his exile in Vienna, spent time in Cafe
Central; it was the gentle and loquacious Herr Bronstein from Cafe
Central who later become the dreaded Trotsky, the scourge of the
counter-revolutionaries.
There are other figures of 'Herr Bronstein' which enact a similar
mystifying transubstantiation of Trotsky and thus stand in the way of
properly understanding his importance. First, there is the gentrified
image of Trotsky popularized today by the latter-day Trotskyists them
selves: Trotsky the anti-bureaucratic libertarian critic of the Stalinist
Therrnidor, partisan of workers' self-organization, supporter of psycho
analysis and modem art, friend of surrealists, etc. (and one should
include in this 'etc.' the brief love affair with Frida Kahlo) ... this
is the domesticated figure that leads one not to be surprised that some
viii TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM
ofBush's neocons are ex-Trotskyists (exemplary is here the fate of Partisan
Review: it started in the 1930s as the voice of the Communist intellectuals
and artists; then it became Trotskyist, then the organ of liberal Cold
Warriors - now it supports Bush in the War on Terror). This Trotsky
almost makes one sympathetic to Stalin's anti-Trotskyist wisdom.
Those critical of Trotsky invented another figure of'Herr Bronstein':
Trotsky as the 'wandering Jew' of the 'permanent revolution' who
could not find peace in the routine post-revolutionary process of
(re)constructing a new order. No wonder that, in the 1930s, even many
conservatives looked favourably both upon the Stalinist cultural counter
revolution as well as upon the expulsion of Trotsky - both were read
as an abandonment of the earlier Jewish-international revolutionary
spirit and as the return to Russian roots. Even such a critic ofBolshevism
as Nikolai Berdaiev expressed in the 1940s, just before his death, a
certain sympathy for Stalin, and considered returning to the USSR.
Along these lines, Trotsky appears like a kind of Russian Che Guevara
in contrast to Fidel: Fidel, the actual leader, supreme authority of the
state, versus Che, the eternal revolutionary rebel who could not resign
himself to just running a state. Is this not something like a Soviet Union
in which Trotsky would not have been rejected as the arch-traitor?
Imagine if, in the middle of the 1920s, Trotsky had emigrated and
renounced Soviet citizenship in order to instigate permanent revolution
around the world, and then had died soon afterwards - after his death,
Stalin would have dutifully elevated him into a cult ...
All this makes Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky's reply to Karl
Kautsky's vicious attacks on the Bolsheviks, so important: it belies
both these figures. Kautsky, who is today deservedly forgotten, was
in the 1920s the eminence grise of the German Social Democratic Party,
by far the strongest Social Democratic party in the world, and the
guardian of Marxist orthodoxy against both Bernsteinian revisionism
and leftist extremism. Terrorism and Communism presents a Trotsky
who knew how to be hard, to exercise terror, and a Trotsky fully
ready to accept the task of reconstructing daily life.
There is nonetheless a third figure of' Herr Bronstein', one which
relies precisely on Terrorism and Communism: Trotsky the precursor
of Stalin wh9, in 1920, already called for one-party rule, militar
ization of labour ... No wonder Terrorism and Communism is
disowned even by many a Trotskyist, from Isaac Deutscher to Ernest
Mandel (who characterized it as Trotsky's 'worst book', his relapse
FOREWORD ix
into anti-democratic dictatorship). There are passages in Terrorism and
Communism which effectively seem to point forwards to the Stalinist
1930s with their spirit of total industrial mobilization to drag Russia
out of its backwardness. After Stalin's death, a well-read copy of
Terrorism and Communism was found among his private papers, full of
handwritten notes which signalled Stalin's enthusiastic approval - what
more does one need as a proof?
This is why Terrorism and Communism is Trotsky's key book, his
'symptomal' text which should on no account be politely ignored
but, on the contrary, focused on. We leave to the canailles of cynical
wisdom the dubious pleasure of dwelling on the (from the hindsight
of today's perspective) all too obvious illusions of the book, starting
with Trotsky's reliance on the forthcoming West European revolution.
One should not forget that this belief was shared by all Bolsheviks,
Lenin included, who saw the survival of their power not as opening
up the space for 'constructing socialism in one country', but as buying
them a breathing space, surviving till relief arrived in the guise of the
West European revolution that would release the pressure.1 The crucial
problem lies elsewhere: the battle for Trotsky should be won on the
very 'Stalinist' terrain of terror and industrial mobilization: it is here
that a minimal, but crucial, difference between Trotsky and Stalin has
to be demonstrated.
WHY WAR COMMUNISM?
Let us begin with the historical moment when the book was written:
1920, the last stages of the civil war, when Russia had been 'looted,
weakened, exhausted [and was] falling apart', to quote Trotsky's own
straight and honest description. Disease, hunger and cold stalked the
land; the lives of the workers had gotten worse, not better; the promises
of the revolution were more distant than ever - here, again, is Trotsky's
own candid admission from a speech given on the third anniversary
of the October Revolution:
We went into this struggle with magnificent ideals, with magnificent
enthusiasm, and it seemed to many people that the promised land
of communist fraternity, the flowering not only of material but
spiritual life, was much closer than it has actually turned out to
x TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM
be .... The promised land - the new kingdom ofj ustice, freedom,
contentment and cultural uplift - was so near it could be touched ....
If back then, three years ago, we had been given the opportunity
oflooking ahead, we would not have believed our eyes. We would
not have believed that three years after the proletarian revolution
it would be so hard for us, so harsh to be living on this earth ...2
Therein resides the greatness of the Bolsheviks: at this point of utter
disappointment, when their position was 'in the highest degree tragic',
they did not withdraw and concede defeat, but persisted. Was, however,
the price they paid for this persistence, for their success in surviving,
not too high? Here is the predominant story of the fateful year 1920
shared by fanatical anti-communist historians, new-generation 'revisionists'
and even some erstwhile Trotskyists themselves (such as Deutscher):
Russia was 'a theater of the absurd' in which the depressing reality
was presented 'as if it were what it was supposed to be, as imagined
by the Communist leaders'.3 And what did the Communist leaders
imagine reality to be? They basically halludnated: their reaction to the
utter social catastrophe was a weird millenarian euphoria, that is, it
appeared to them that the catastrophe opened up a chance of a 'short
cut to Communism': 'In a veritable ideological delirium, the most
colossal economic collapse of the century was transmogrified into
really-existing Communism, the radiant future hie et nunc. '4 For
example, grain-requisitioning by force was 'regarded by the Party,
from Lenin down, as not merely socialism, but even communism'. 5
The Bolsheviks were thus 'inclined to see the essential features of fully
fledged communism embodied in the war economy of 1919-20'.6 The
next logical step from here is, of course, to identify the war economy
with Stalin's concentration camps:
A decade later Stalin, who in 1920-1 had supported Lenin's 'liberal'
policy, was to adopt Trotsky's ideas in all but name. Neither Stalin
nor Trotsky, nor the adherents of either, then admitted the fact ....
What was only one of many facets in Trotsky's experimental
thinking was to become Stalin's alpha and omega.7
The path from Trotsky to Stalin is thus the path from accidental origin
to its repetition which elevated it into necessity. It is as if the historical
accident of the civil-war devastation touched upon something that
FOREWORD xi
was there in the Bolshevik 'unconscious' from the very beginning,
serving as 'the day residue' which brought it to life: the 'bureaucratic
fantasy of imposing communism by decree'. No wonder, then, that,
even after the accidental pretext disappeared (the civil war was over),
Bolsheviks could not resist the temptation to stick to the same formulae:
political terror (ruthless suppression of all opposition), militarization
oflabour, total regulation of production by the centralized state planning.
The conclusion was formulated succinctly by Orlando Figes: 'The
perversion was implicit in the system from the start. '8 Here are some
of Trotsky's harshest formulations:
The introduction of compulsory labour service is unthinkable
without the application, to a greater or lesser degree, of the methods
of militarization oflabour. ... Ifo rganized economic life is unthink
able without compulsory labour service, the latter is not to be
realized without the abolition of the fiction of the freedom of
labour, and without the substitution for it of the obligatory principle,
which is supplemented by real compulsion. . . . For we can have
no way to socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the
economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized
distribution of labour-power in harmony with the general state
plan. The labour state considers itself empowered to send every
worker to the place where his work is necessary.
To add insult to injury, as it were, Trotsky even presages the infamous
Stalinist thesis that, in the passage from capitalism to socialism, the
state 'withers away' through the strengthening of its organs, specifically
of its organs of coercion:
under socialism there will be no compulsion ... the principle of
compulsion contradicts socialism . . . under socialism we shall be
moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness
oflabour, etc., etc. This is unquestionable. Only this unquestionable
truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under socialism
there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the
state: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and
consuming commune. Nonetheless, the road to socialism lies
through a period of the highest possible intensification of the
principle of the state. And you and I are just passing through that