[f.....d]

Christopher Finlay — Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Marx to Žižek

In her classic treatments of the subject, Hannah Arendt made two general remarks on the relationship between revolutions and violence. Writing in the early 1960s, she commented that, like war, revolution was indelibly marked with the occurrence of violence to such an extent that the two phenomena tended to mutate into one another. By the end of the decade, however, Arendt’s essay On Violence introduced an important qualification. Violence, she argued, had not generally been regarded as essential to revolution until relatively recently. While theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon gave violence a defining role in revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had regarded it as incidental. Violence, according to their metaphor, was a midwife whose interventions may (or may not) be required during the birth of a new society out of the womb of the old. The idea that violence was definitive of authentic revolutionary action was, she maintained, a relatively new one in the twentieth century.

The central purpose of this essay is to initiate a detailed examination of the place of violence in Marxist revolutionary theory and theories drawing on Marxism, thus to understand better their impulses and to map their limits. There are a number of reasons why this subject should still command the attention of political theorists. First, the theme of revolutionary violence has by no means entirely died out from influential currents of western, secular, leftist political theory. Although current analytical Marxism pays much less attention to questions of revolutionary transition than to those of the theory of equality and justice, witness Slavoj Žižek’s recent explorations of the role of violence in Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinist totalitarianism5 and Ted Honderich’s radical approach to democracy and terrorism. The theme of revolutionary violence therefore remains an issue in contemporary theory. It remains important too as a facet of recent revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary political practices. In particular, the emergence of a widespread focus on terrorism as a ‘global’ force demands fresh thinking about the way in which ideological frameworks, whether secular or not, lend themselves to deployment in justification of violence. For much of the twentieth century, Marxism provided the most widely used conceptual framework for contemplating revolutionary violence, but there has been insufficient work in the literature on the history of political thought to map out analytically the ways in which violence is driven or permitted by Marxian theory (though there have, of course, been many denunciations of a more or less polemical nature). To initiate such a map will therefore be useful, finally, for those wishing to understand better the relationships between theory and practice in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.

Adam Schaff — Marxist Theory on Revolution and Violence

The last paragraph of the Manifesto of the Communist Party reads: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

This by now classic formulation includes two statements:

(a) that the existing social and political system is to be changed by a revolution;

(b) that a social revolution is to be identified with an overthrow of that existing social system by violence.

This idea recurs in the works of Marx and Engels so many times that it has become trivial to identify the labor movement guided by Marxist theory with the movement which strives for a social revolution to be attained through recourse to violence. Moreover, all this has even contributed to the almost universal identification of the concept of social revolution with that of a revolution that resorts to violence. This has certainly been influenced by the historical examples of all those social upheavals which have come to be termed "revolutions," but in recent times also, to a large extent, by that image of revolution which has been outlined above and which complies with the current interpretation of Marxism.

Yet it suffices to study the Marxist theory of revolution a little more in depth, and also to acquire a somewhat better knowledge of the statements made on the subject by the founders of Marxist theory to see the fallacy of such opinions. Both Marx and Engels and, later, Lenin on many occasions referred to a peaceful revolution, that is, one attained by a class struggle, but not by violence. More than that, they used to substantiate the necessity of distinguishing the concept of social revolution from the paths on which it may take place on given occasions, namely, by distinguishing between a violent and a peaceful revolution, and not identifying violence with revolution. A thorough understanding of this issue, apart from its theoretical aspect, also has important practical and political implications, and hence it must attract attention, especially now, in view of the present discussions and divergences of opinion in the international labor movement concerning the proper course to be taken in the future.

#lewackikacikczytelniczy #marksizm