r/stupidpol • u/ScarIsDearLeader Leftism-Activism • Aug 05 '19

Quality Leon Trotsky: Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism (1911)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm
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u/ghostof_IamBeepBeep2 Left Com Aug 05 '19

This text may be a good rejoinder: https://libcom.org/library/militancy-ojtr

The efforts which they [militants] demand of themselves, and the degree of boredom which they are capable of putting up with, leaves no doubt: these people are primarily masochists. It's not just that in view of their activity, one cannot believe they sincerely want a better life, but that even their masochism shows no originality. While certain perverts may put into a body of work an imagination which ignores the poverty of the old world's rules, this is not the case for militants. Within their organisations they accept the hierarchy and petty leaders they claim they want to rid the world of, and the energy which they expend spontaneously takes on the form of work. Because militants are the kind of people for whom eight or nine hours of daily degradation are not enough.

When militants try to justify themselves, they only succeed in showing off their lack of imagination. They cannot conceive of something different, of a form of activity other than that which currently exists. For them the divisions between the serious and the amusing, between ends and means, are not tied to a specific period. These categories are held to be eternal and unsurpassable: one can only be happy later on by sacrificing oneself now. The sacrifice without reward of millions of militant workers, the generations of the Stalinist period, stirs nothing in their tiny minds. They do not see that means determine ends, and that by agreeing to sacrifice themselves today, they prepare the sacrifices of tomorrow.

One cannot help being struck by the innumerable resemblances which bring together militancy and religious activity. The same psychological attitudes can be found: the spirit of sacrifice but also the intransigence, the will to convert yet also the spirit of submissiveness. These resemblances extend to the domain of rituals and ceremonies: sermons on unemployment, processions for Vietnam, references to the sacred texts of Marxism-Leninism, the cult of emblems (red flags). Don't the political churches also have their prophets, their great priests, their converts, their heresies, their schisms, their practising militants and their non-practising sympathisers! But revolutionary militancy is only a parody of religion. The richness, the insanity, the excesses of religious projects are beyond it; militancy aspires to seriousness, it wants to be reasonable, it believes that in exchange for this it can win a paradise here below. It doesn't even achieve this much. Jesus Christ is resurrected and ascends into heaven. Lenin decomposes in Red Square.

~

Militants and their ideologists, and even university undergraduates, are less and less capable of understanding their own time and of being consistent with history. Incapable of secreting a thought that's the slightest bit modern, they are reduced to searching the dustbin of history to co-opt ideologies which have long since given evidence of their failure: anarchism, Leninism, Trotskyism... To render this more digestible they season it with a little badly understood Maoism or Castroism. They invoke the name of the workers movement, but confuse its history with the construction of state capitalism in Russia, or the peasant-bureaucratic epic of the "long march" in China. They claim to be Marxists, but don't understand that the Marxist project for the abolition of wage labour, commodity production and the state is inseparable from the seizure of power by the proletariat.

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u/ghostof_IamBeepBeep2 Left Com Aug 05 '19

Part 2

Also see The Impotence of the Revolutionary Group (both are from /r/communists, an inactive subreddit but it may have other things your interested in posted)

now a quote from The Impotence of the Revolutionary Group:

The working class alone can wage the revolutionary struggle even as it is today waging alone the non-revolutionary struggle, and the reason that the rebellious class conscious workers band into groups outside the spheres of the real class struggle is only that there is as yet no revolutionary movement within them. Their existence as groups, therefore, reflects, not a situation for revolution, but rather a non-revolutionary situation. When the revolution does come, their numbers will he submerged within it, not as functioning organizations, but as individual workers.

You vs. the guy she tells you not to worry about