Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism

by Karl Radek, Patrick Lavin, Marxian Educational Society (Creator)

This volume presents a collection of essays by Karl Radek, a leading Bolshevik during the Russian Revolution. The pieces discuss the nature of proletarian dictatorship and the use of terrorism as a political tool. The book also features additional commentary by the Marxian Educational Society and an introduction by Patrick Lavin. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Genres: History

70 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 2015

About the author

Karl Berngardovich Radek (October 31, 1885 – May 19, 1939) was a Marxist active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I, and an international Communist leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pamphlet written as a reply to Kautsky's The Dictatorship of the Proletariat/Terrorism and Communism in which Radek defends the use of terrorism as a political weapon against the bourgeoisie in the hands of the proletariat. Radek uses the French Terror as the historic counterpart for the bourgeoisie in destroying feudalism, and critiques Kautsky's romanticization of the the Paris Commune's "softness" as one of the chief reasons for the Commune's failure. "Terrorism" in the modern context is not what is meant here, but repression.

"The meaning of terrorism in the revolution is that the revolutionary class, even in the hour of greatest danger, shrinks from nothing in order to accomplish its will, and defends itself with all its might."

[Eric Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

At the time he wrote this in 1920, Karl Radek was a loyal Bolshevik. This short book, like Trotsky’s more famous Terrorism and Communism, was written in rebuttal to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title. Radek had the same politics as Trotsky but none of his skill as a writer. This book is a hatchet job, dismissing Kautsky — once known as ‘Pope of Marxism’ — as senile, decrepit, irrelevant, cowardly, a tool of the international bourgeoisie, and so on. Of course one wonders why bother writing a response to Kautsky if he was so unimportant. Clearly the Bolshevik leadership considered Kautsky’s critical writings about their new Soviet state as a threat — which is why Lenin, Trotsky and Radek all dropped what they were doing in the middle of a civil war to write rebuttals of varying length and quality. Much of the discussion in this book follows Kautsky’s own work, focussing on the French Revolution of the late 18th century and on the Paris Commune of 1871. Radek did his best to defend the Soviet regime, but in the end he died in one of Stalin’s labour camps after having confessed to treason at one of the Moscow show trials – a victim of the terror he defended in these pages.

[Michael Percy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Radek raises the proverbial "one man's nourishment is another man's poison" by comparing Stalin's purging to the treatment of Irish revolutionaries by the British in the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921. This brochure was written by Radek in about 1920 (the English translations came later) and was endorsed by Leon Trotsky as a suitable response to Karl Kautsky, a German social-democrat, and his critique of Trotsky's Dictatorship vs. Democracy, among other works. It is interesting that the title of which Trotsky was most fond was "Terrorism or Communism", but this was toned down for an American audience. And here I discover a whole can of historical worms. Communists in America, communists in the UK, critiques of Bolshevism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and so on. And then much later Trotsky in exile and a major critic of Stalin and the self-serving bureaucracy that was to become the antithesis of socialism, as the lowest level of communism. The great communist experiment was of global interest, despite the Western Allies' support of the anti-Bolshevik White Russians in the Russian Civil War of 1919-1923. Even a small contingent of Australian soldiers fought against the Bolsheviks. Yet there remained support from socialists in the West through various trade union and communist movements. This "support" seemed an ideal rather than a plausible solution to humanity's problems. I recall reading that Lionel Murphy's parents (according to Jenny Hocking in Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography) visited Russia after the Second World War but never spoke of the great socialist experiment ever again after lifting the veil on the propaganda. Reading this has provided me with several historical insights, aside from the Soviet Union, into the Irish War of Independence and the French Revolution, and for these alone it was worth the discovery, if not for the intellectual debating that went on between the Soviet intelligentsia and their detractors in the 1920s.