Written and published in 1920 in the midst of the threat of invasion by dozens of counter-revolutionary powers and with the dislocation and desperation of the October Revolution scarcely having settled, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism was a direct retort to the work of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky, though little known today, was then a figure of some power and authority who was the leading German social democrat of the day: Kautsky’s arguments were that a revolution could be effected within the existing parliamentary democracy, that there would be no need to pre-empt revolutionary action before it spontaneously erupted and that no violence or terror should be used against the counter-revolutionaries.
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