On Revolutionary Morality

(Quote of the Week)

Many radical intellectuals in the late 1930s justified their departure from the Marxist movement by denouncing Bolshevism as “amoral” and equating Trotskyism, the continuator of the program of the 1917 October Revolution, with the Stalinist perversion of Marxism. In a polemic against such apologists for the bourgeois order, Leon Trotsky upheld Bolshevism’s revolutionary morality, which flows from the necessities of the class struggle.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another....

Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders.” Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty-bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.

—Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (1938)