Is the murder of a capitalist an "act of revolution"? Does the workers' movement, the working class in general, gain anything if someone places a bomb in the headquarters of a multinational company? Practically speaking, who benefits from individual acts of terrorism?
The so-called "left-wing terrorism," that is, individual terrorism with a "leftist," "revolutionary" ideological and political guise, has its roots in various anarchist trends of the 19th century.
In numerous cases, the activities of such organizations were utilized by the bourgeois class in order to slander the communist and working-class movement and, on the other hand, to strengthen the methods of repression. In Greece, for example, the actions of "November 17" (17N) an organization that operated unhindered for 27 consecutive years, murdering diplomats, businessmen, and politicians, were used by the bourgeois governments and media with the aim of equating Marxism-Leninism with terrorism. Among the symbols used by the members of 17N were Karl Marx and Che Guevara! However, neither Marx nor Che approved of individual terrorism as a means of class struggle.
Marxism-Leninism, both as theory and practical action, has nothing to do with individual terrorism. The transition from capitalism to socialism requires the revolutionary struggle of the working class and its allies, that is, the vast majority of the people, against the power of the monopolies.
The working class, precisely because it does not own any means of production, because it is the one that produces surplus value, which capital appropriates, is the one that can, by taking political power, transform the individual ownership of the means of production into social ownership. However, this does not happen through forms of struggle like individual terrorism. On the contrary, it requires mass socio-political, revolutionary action. This is the class struggle, which is conducted effectively through the guidance of a political party that represents and promotes the interests of the working class; that is the Communist Party.
The entire history of societies and the transition from one to another, is a history of class struggle, revolutions, and armed uprisings that bear the signature of the vast majority of the popular masses. Violence is indeed the midwife of history. But this role belongs exclusively to the violence exercised by the masses as a whole; not by individuals or small groups of people who have been self-proclaimed as “punishers” of the exploiters. After all, no social issue is resolved by assassinating political figures. Individual terrorism is the enemy of the revolutionary process.
In their writings, Marx and Engels sharply criticized the adventurist actions of Sergey Nechayev, an anarcho-communist and associate of Bakunin, whose promotion of “individual terror” had a negative impact in the then rising Russian democratic revolutionary movement. Regarding similar activities by persons or groups, Engels was writing to Pablo Iglesias Posse in April 1893:
“(...) As for the anarchists, they seem not to be far from suicide. This passionate feverish frenzy, this firework of murders, which have no meaning, and, if you look closely, are paid and staged by the police, cannot fail to open even the bourgeoisie's eyes to the true nature of this propaganda by insane and corrupt agents(...)”.
Following the bloody repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchists launched an attack against the then “International Workingmen Association”. On 24 January 1872, in a letter addressed to Teodor Kundo, among other things Engels was pointing out:
If one considers that these people have launched their conspiracy precisely at the moment when a general hue and cry is being raised against the International, one cannot help thinking that the international sleuths must have a hand in the game. And so it is. In Béziers the Geneva Bakuninists have picked the chief superintendent of police as their correspondent! [...] “How far the Russian police is involved in this I shall leave for the present undecided, but Bakunin was deeply embroiled in the Nechayev affair (he denies it, of course, but we have the original Russian reports here and since Marx and I understand Russian he cannot put anything over on us). Nechayev is either a Russian agent provocateur or anyhow acted as if he were. There are moreover all kinds of suspicious characters among Bakunin’s Russian friends".
As for the “secret alliance” between Bakunin and Nechayev, which aimed to infiltrate the “International Workingmen Association” in order to undermine and dissolve it, Marx and Engels were stressing out in September 1873:
"Here we have a society which, under the mask of the most extreme anarchism, directs its blows not against the existing governments but against the revolutionaries who accept neither its dogma nor its leadership. Founded by a minority at a bourgeois congress, t infiltrates the ranks of the international organisation of the working class, at first attempts to dominate it and, when this plan fails, sets to work to disorganise it […] It resorts to any means, any disloyalty to achieve its ends; lies, slander, intimidation, the stab in the back—it finds them all equally suitable. Finally, in Russia it substitutes itself entirely for the International and commits, in its name, crimes against the common law, acts of fraud and an assassination for which the government and bourgeois press has blamed our Association [...] Let the ringleaders of the Alliance cry out that they have been denounced. We deliver them up to the scorn of the workers and the benevolence of the governments whom they have served so well in disorganising the proletarian movement. The Zurich Tagwacht, in a reply to Bakunin, had every right to say: If you are not a paid agent, the one thing quite certain is that a paid agent would never have succeeded in doing as much harm as you.” (1)
So, what about Lenin? What was the stance of the leader of the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution towards the anarchist-oriented individual terrorism? The fact is that he fiercely opposed the adventurist, in many cases provocative, activities of Russian socialist revolutionaries who were promoting the concept of “political assassinations”. Lenin's views on the issue are expressed in his work “Revolutionary Adventurism”, published in 1902:
“Let us go over to the second point, the question of terrorism. 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.“
“We are not repeating the terrorists’ mistakes and are not diverting attention from work among the masses, the Socialist-Revolutionaries assure us, and at the same time enthusiastically recommend to the Party acts such as Balmashov’s assassination of Sipyagin, although everyone knows and sees perfectly well that this act was in no way connected with the masses…”
“Whom are we to strike down?” asks the party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and replies: the ministers, and not the tsar, for “the tsar will not allow matters to go to extremes” (!! How did they find that out??), and besides “it is also easier” (this is literally what they say!): “No minister can ensconce himself in a palace as in a fortress.” And this argument concludes with the following piece of reasoning, which deserves to be immortalised as a model of the “theory” of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. “Against the crowd the autocracy has its soldiers; against the revolutionary organisations its secret and uniformed police; but what will save it...” (what kind of “it” is this? The autocracy? The author has unwittingly identified the autocracy with a target in the person of a minister whom it is easier to strike down!) "... from individuals or small groups that are ceaselessly, and even in ignorance of one another [!!], preparing for attack, and are attacking? No force will be of avail against elusiveness. Hence, our task is clear: to remove every one of the autocracy’s brutal oppressors by the only means that has been left [!] us by the autocracy–death."
"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."
"We, revolutionaries [..] is necessary to use group action more energetically, boldly, and harmoniously. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, conclude: “Shoot, elusive individual, for the knot of people, alas, is still a long way off, and besides there are soldiers against the knot.” This really defies all reason, gentlemen!".
(1): The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association Report and Documents Published by Decision of the Hague Congress of the International, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 23.
Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
