Introduction to Political Theory

but Harris’s argument is questionable. For Marx does not regard the exploitation

of labour by capital as violent, and in Capitalhe argues it is the ‘dull compulsion’

of the relations of production that subjects labour to capital. It is not normally

violence or force. The Communist Manifestoargues that when workers destroyed

imported goods, smashed machinery and set factories ablaze, they failed to

understand that it is the relations of production that need to be changed, not the

instruments of production (Marx and Engels, 1967: 89). Random acts of violence

are unhelpful and misguided.

It is true that Marx and Engels in the Address of the Central Authority to the

[Communist] Leaguespeak of the fact that the communists ‘must compel the

democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases’ encouraging popular revenge

against hated individuals or public buildings (1978: 202), but this was said in the

throes of violent revolution against an autocratic system and cannot be taken as an

endorsement of violence against a liberal state. What makes Marx sceptical about

political violence in general is that it rests upon a belief in an abstract will, not in

the maturation of material conditions. This is why he comments in On the Jewish

Questionthat the belief that private property can be abolished through the guillotine

as in the reign of terror by the Jacobins, is naive and counterproductive (Marx and

Engels, 1975: 156). (The Jacobins were radicals who resorted to political violence

and terror in the later phases of the French Revolution of 1789.)

The problem of violence arises in Marxism from the belief in the inevitability of

revolution. Revolution invariably involves violence and if such violence is directed

against a liberal society, it counts as political violence. Moreover, the idea that the

use of violence is purely tactical and arouses no problem of morality ignores the

difficulty which violence creates in a liberal society.

The Leninist and Maoist position on political violence

In countries like Tsarist Russia (1696–1917), the use of violence against particular

individuals was deemed counterproductive by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, it was labelled

political violence, even terrorism, both by its propagators and critics. What made

such violence harmful was that it did not advance the cause of anti-Tsarism. Thus

the killing of Tsar Alexander II who had come to power in 1881 created, as Laqueur

points out, a backlash and was used to justify more severe policies on behalf of the

regime. In the same way, the upsurge of democratic forces that compelled the Tsarist

government to introduce a new constitution lost its impact when, as a result of

‘terrorist’ attacks in 1906, these concessions were withdrawn.

The problem here is that the attacks on particular figures are premised upon a

flawed analysis of the political process. Many of the terrorists and champions of

political violence, past and present (see Chapter 11 on Anarchism), have been

motivated by an anarchist philosophy which extols abstract willpower, and has

little regard for broadening and deepening a popular movement opposed to a

repressive regime. Marx and Engels condemned the Fenians – the Irish Republican

Brotherhood – in London, not because the two revolutionaries did not sympathise

with the cause of Irish freedom, but because they felt that blowing up people in

Chapter 20 Political violence 453