Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity
| Author | Christopher J. Finlay |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885106067277 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Violence and Revolutionary
Subjectivity
Marx to Z
v
iz
v
ek
Christopher J. Finlay University College Dublin
abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between
revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian
theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer
limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical analysis of a series
of later discussions – by Sorel, Fanon and Z
izek – which transformed the terms in
which violence was discussed by developing one particular aspect of Marxist thought.
By teasing out the implications of revolutionary theory for the commission and
permission of violence, it is possible to specify those points at which it tends towards
excess. This in turn points towards limits that an adequate normative theory of
revolutionary violence should establish.
key words: Benjamin, communism, Engels, Fanon, Lukács, Marx, revolution, Sartre,
Sorel, terrorism, violence, Z
izek
. . . force plays another role in history [than as a perpetrator of evil], namely a
revolutionary role; . . . it is, in Marx’s words, the midwife of every old society when it is
pregnant with the new; . . . it is the instrument whereby the social movement forces its way
through and shatters the petrified, dead political forms . . .1
In her respective treatments of the subject,2Hannah 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.3By 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. Vio-
lence, 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.4
373
article
Contact address: Dr Christopher J. Finlay, Dublin European Institute (L520),
School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Belfield,
Dublin 4, Ireland.
Email: cfinlay@usa.net
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 5(4)373–397
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067277]
The idea that violence was definitive of authentic revolutionary action was, she
maintained, a relatively new one in the 20th century.
The central purpose of this article 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 ques-
tions of revolutionary transition than to those of the theory of equality and justice,
witness Slavoj Z
izek’s recent explorations of the role of violence in Leninist
Bolshevism and Stalinist totalitarianism5and Ted Honderich’s radical approach
to democracy and terrorism.6The theme of revolutionary violence therefore is
still an issue in contemporary theory. It remains important too as a facet of recent
revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary political practices. In particular, the emer-
gence 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
20th 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 revolution-
ary politics in the 20th century.7
Of course, it would be impossible to do justice in a single article to the full range
of theoretical perspectives derived from Marxism and it is necessary to be selec-
tive. I therefore focus in the first part on texts by Marx and Engels themselves.
Against this background, I then examine some of the more novel and, in many
ways, idiosyncratic treatments of revolutionary violence that have since drawn on
them. Part 1 outlines three basic pillars in Marx and Engels’s theory of revolution,
each of which contributes to defining a space where violence is permitted or
demanded. The first two pillars are commonly associated in historical studies of
communist revolution with the commission of violence in the name of a dictator-
ship of the proletariat. I argue, however, in part 2, that the third pillar, originating
in the theory of ideology and class consciousness, formed the basis for innovations
that created a further, different kind of permissive doctrine of violence. This
forms an intellectually distinctive strand of thought. While elements of this may
well be found in other texts, part 2 examines those theorists whose writings most
clearly and explicitly exemplify the particular kind of argument that I want to
explore, one that draws on Marxist theory, albeit in creative synthesis with other
influences. Subsections focus on texts by Sorel, Fanon and Z
izek (and, inter
European Journal of Political Theory 5(4)
374
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