Terrorism And Communism

First published in English in 1920, this work is a reissue of Karl Kautsky's seminal work dealing with the origins and history of the forces at work in revolutionary epochs, which offers pathbreaking insights on the development of civilisation. The opening chapters, dealing with eigthteenth century France, are of special interest to the student of the French revolution. The section devoted to the Commune of Paris offers a stimulating and provocative description of this famous govenment of the working class. The reissue of this controversial and extraordinary work will be welcomed by all those interested in the history of Communism in particular and the theory and history of revolution in general.

Trotsky and Slavoj Žižek defend revolutionary violence Written in the white heat of revolutionary Russia’s Civil War, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism is one of the most potent defenses of revolutionary dictatorship. In his provocative commentary to this new edition the philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Trotsky’s attack on the illusions of liberal democracy has a vital relevance today.

The Defence of Terrorism, originally written in 1920 on a military train during the Russian Civil War, represents one of Trotsky’s most wide-ranging and original contributions to the debates that dominated the 1920s and ‘30s. Trotsky’s intention is "far away from any thought of defending terrorism in general". Rather, he seeks to promote an historical justification for the Revolution, by demonstrating that history has set up the ‘revolutionary violence of the progressive class’ against the ‘conservative violence of the outworn classes’. The argument is developed in response to the influential Marxist intellectual Karl Kautsky, who refuted Trotsky’s ‘militarisation of labour’ and Lenin’s wholesale rejection of a ‘bloodless revolution’. The introduction, written for the second edition of 1935, presents Trotsky’s reflections on the similarities between Kautsky and the burgeoning British Labour Party: specifically, it recapitulates Trotsky’s belief that revolution conducted according to the norms of Parliamentarianism is no revolution at all.

This work constitutes a rebuttal to charges made against the Bolsheviks by Karl Kautsky in 1919. Trotsky's defense of Bolshevism is devoted to two basic questions. 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. The other is the question of the methods to be pursued by a socialist revolution in realizing socialism, that is, in reorganizing the economic foundation of society.