14.04.2004

Terrorism, alliances and class independence

Are the Madrid bombers and al Qa'eda potential allies in the struggle against imperialism or reactionary enemies of the working class? Mike Macnair gives a communist view

The Madrid train bombings have seen a major outpouring of talk about terrorism. Of course, since September 9 2001 we have been involved in the USA’s ‘war on terror’; but individual large-scale terrorist outrages, like the Madrid train bombings, the Bali night club bombings and 9/11 itself bring ‘terrorism’ to the fore of news and analysis.

On the left, the Socialist Alliance discussion e-list has seen an argument between comrades from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party about terrorism. This argument was sparked by the fact that the Muslim Association of Britain had promptly condemned the Madrid train-bombings, as it did Bali and 9/11, while the SWP did not issue an outright condemnation because it is unwilling to appear to side with the oppressor and with the “real terrorists”, Bush and Blair. The AWL comrades have insisted that this policy is an aspect of the unravelling of the SWP’s Marxism. Gerry Byrne’s article ‘Madrid, morals and moralism’ on the AWL’s website insists that we purge ourselves of the poisons of Stalinism and “post-modern relativism” to retrieve a socialism based on human solidarity and dignity (see www.workersliberty.-org). SWP comrades contributing to the SA e-list have argued that the term ‘terrorism’ has become meaningless.

It might help clarify this discussion to think a bit more about possible definitions.

Media-speak terrorism

The media-speak/political spin definition of ‘terrorism’ is clearly as follows:

(1) military action involving the use of firearms or explosives;

(2) by non-state actors - states are only called ‘terrorist’ by bourgeois politicians and the media by way of an allegation that they sponsor use of military force by non-state actors;

(3) for political purposes (ordinary armed robbers, the Mafia, etc are not referred to in this way by politicians and the media);

(4) of which the speaker/writer disapproves. Thus al Qa’eda are terrorists now, but when they were fighting the PDPA regime and the Soviets in Afghanistan were part of the ‘Afghan resistance’.

This last feature of the media-speak definition makes it completely worthless and means that the claim that a group or action is terrorist is a judgment on its political goals and nothing more. If, however, this element were removed, the remaining definition would be equally clearly ideological and unjustifiable, since it would amount to no more than an assertion that the use of military force by non-state actors is wrong under any circumstances: ie, the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s defence of tyranny.

This media-speak definition has obviously got nothing to do with the opposition of Marxists around 1900 to the ‘individual terrorism’ of the Russian group, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), and the old-time anarchists, or with the debate Trotsky was engaged in when he wrote Terrorism and communism in 1920.

Military terrorism

There is available an alternative definition with a military core, which is much more useful than that employed by the media. Under this alternative, terrorism is:

(1) military action (as above);

(2) which is deliberately targeted at civilians primarily;

(3) with the aim of destroying the enemy’s morale - for example, by showing that its armed or ‘security’ forces cannot protect the civilian population.

Under this definition area bombing in World War II was clearly terrorism, as has been much of the USA’s bombing operations since (Vietnam and so on, down to the invasion of Iraq). So too, in part, was union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia in the American Civil War. Equally the IRA’s car-bombing campaign in the 70s (and most clearly its campaigns against commerce and on the mainland) was terrorist. So too are al Qa’eda’s operations, including 9/11, Bali and Madrid; Israeli operations in the occupied territories and Lebanon; Palestinian suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians; and the bombs directed against shia religious events and leaders in Iraq.

In contrast IRA attacks on police stations and army patrols in the past and the analogous attacks in present-day Iraq on the US occupiers and the puppet police force, etc are not terrorism, but ordinary guerrilla warfare. The deaths and injuries to civilians are collateral, just as they are in military operations between regular state armies.

Marxism and terrorism

The classic Marxist debates were not directed at terrorism in this core sense but at two related, but peripheral phenomena.

(a) The first is ‘individual terrorism’: ie, assassinations of individual political figures identified as tyrants or public officials of tyrannical states, as practised by Narodnaya Volya, and more recently by the Red Army Fraction, Brigade Rosse and so on.

(b) The second is the use of hostage-taking and collective responsibility as means of control of a hostile civil population, pioneered (in recent times) by the British in the colonies, applied to their occupied territories by the Germans in World War I, and adopted by the Bolsheviks as part of their strategy for controlling the middle classes and the peasantry during the civil war.

The classic Marxist critique of individual terrorism type (a) is that:

(i) it is ineffective, since it is not individual tyrants who are the problem, but the ruling class as a whole and its regime (the individual assassinated is merely replaced);

(ii) it is counterproductive, since it legitimates the repressive measures of the regime; and

(iii) (most fundamentally) we consider that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself”, not of self-appointed military ‘saviours from on high’. On the contrary, the socialism which is our goal is only possible on the basis of the action of the working class majority.

Trotsky’s argument in Terrorism and communism was that majority-based ‘terrorism’ of type (b) above - hostages and collective responsibility - was not subject to these objections. It was merely a type of warfare, and to renounce it - when the Whites had already begun to use terror against the masses in Finland in December 1917 - was to renounce any possibility of resisting the attempts of the minority (the former ruling elite) to coerce and terrorise the majority.

The overwhelming majority of the historical evidence of successful and unsuccessful revolutions, from the late 16th century Dutch Revolt onward, supports part of this argument: if the revolution is not to be drowned in blood, the majority needs to be willing if necessary to wage full-scale war against elements of the old elite. It is less clear either that the Bolsheviks’ use of terror tactics against recalcitrant peasant villages could properly be called ‘majority-based’, or that it actually achieved its goals.

Cold-blooded?

Both sides of these arguments - against ‘individual terrorism’, for ‘mass-based terror’ - may seem pretty cold-blooded. This is entirely correct. The point of Marxism is not to develop elevating moral sentiments, either of sympathy with the exasperation of the oppressed who are ‘driven’ to individual terrorism by the absence of an alternative (SWP), or of humanitarian horror at the loss of human life in terrorism and warfare (AWL). We can have the elevating moral sentiments without Marxism. They are politically impotent. The point of Marxism is to think practically about how it is possible to bring all this shit to an end. That means thinking cold-bloodedly about real constraints on economic and political dynamics and about the fact that some forms of resistance to oppression work and others do not.

When we apply this method to ‘core military terrorism’ - ie, attacks deliberately targeted on civilians in order to undermine morale - the overwhelming evidence is that it does not work. US terrorist bombing of Vietnam utterly failed in its objects. World War II saw experiments on the largest scale with terrorist bombing as an instrument for attacking morale - first by the Nazi regime in the English ‘Blitz’ and in Russia, and then by the USA and Britain in area-bombing. They were complete failures. Going further back, the effect of Sherman’s march through Georgia was to strengthen the Confederates’ will to fight. It was its military achievement in cutting the Confederacy in half, taken together with union general Ulysses S Grant’s unceasing pursuit of the Confederate army of Virginia, which forced a surrender.

A counter-argument which has been heard (usually but not exclusively from supporters of US policy) is that Madrid shows that al-Qa’eda’s terror tactic worked. The bombs induced large numbers of Spanish voters to vote for the anti-war opposition. This is profoundly mistaken. The People’s Party government attempted to blame the Basque nationalist guerrilla/terrorist group Euzkadi ta Askatasuna (Eta) in order to make party-political capital at the expense of its opponents (who were said to be ‘soft on Eta’), and kept doing so even as it became increasingly clear that this was an al Qa’eda attack. It was punished at the polls for lying and attempting to make party capital out of the attack. If the PP ministers had held their fire till the first evidence indicating al Qa’eda responsibility came out, then campaigned around al Qa’eda and the ‘war on terror’, they would probably have won an increased majority.

These cold-blooded practical judgments carry with them moral judgments. Killing other humans we judge to be, other things apart, immoral. This is not uniquely Marxist, but a notion common to most, if not all, human societies, and one which has profound instinctual grounds. But it is an equally commonplace idea that killing in self-defence or in defence of someone else is morally justifiable. For people who are not pacifists these moral justifications for killing can be extended to certain wars: ie, wars of self-defence and in defence of others against aggressive war.

Marxists are not pacifists. Our judgments as to which wars are morally justifiable start from different grounds from those of mainstream politicians, etc. We start from class interests rather than the ‘national interest’. We accept openly that insurrections and civil wars may be justifiable. But we still make such judgments. Even when war is justifiable it will not justify useless killing. Terrorism in the core military sense is immoral because it is pointless killing, and because it is a waste of human life. When a regular army does this, it is properly called a war crime, and it should be called a war crime when irregular forces (like al Qa’eda) do it, too.

Goals and justification

My argument so far has been about terrorism as a means. It has thus presupposed that the goal of the terrorist act is one Marxists share. No-one on the left has any difficulty at all in condemning terrorist acts committed by the far right, like the Milan and Bologna train-bombings (and others) in Italy in the 1970s or German army and SS massacres of civilians in World War II. Few have much difficulty in condemning colonial terrorism (eg, English air-raids, including use of chemical weapons, on Iraqi villages between the two world wars).

At the same time, Marxists do not condemn all military action, or all military action by non-state actors. There is nothing odd or hypocritical about this, as opponents of Marxism sometimes suggest. As I have already pointed out, any moral or political judgment on killing which is not purely pacifist involves a judgment about its purpose. It hardly lies in the mouths of those who - for example - supported Afghan ‘resistance fighters’ in the 1980s to condemn Marxists for ‘hypocrisy’ in using the goals of military action as part of the grounds of political judgment on that action.

Al Qa’eda

The AWL’s approach to Madrid and other al Qa’eda terrorist attacks is partly governed by its view that al Qa’eda (and, indeed, Arab nationalist formations like the Iraqi Ba’ath party) are reactionary anti-capitalist - in effect fascist - organisations. Thus the AWL sees only those goals, as well as means (terrorism), which Marxists oppose. The SWP’s approach is partly governed by the assessment that al Qa’eda and similar jihadi formations in a confused way represent an anti-imperialist movement. Thus the SWP sees primarily goals which Marxists would support. Both of these analyses are profoundly unhelpful.

Al Qa’eda has a goal which Marxists share: that muslims and muslim countries should not be colonially dominated by christians and christian countries, or by jews or the one jewish country in the world, Israel. Its immediate goals - US withdrawal from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, and a Palestinian state - are also ones we share. We share these goal because we are opposed to all forms of domination and inequality. But this carries with it the crucial fact that we are also opposed to domination of muslims over christians or jews, and to inequality within muslim countries - such as the claims of the ulama, the islamic scholars, to determine truth; or chattel slavery (which is authorised by the Qu’ran as well as by the sharia); or the various forms of women’s oppression which were originally part of or have grown up within islamic societies. Al Qa’eda and other jihadi tendencies, on the other hand, see the road to ending imperialist domination (‘the crusade’) as lying through the restoration of the ‘islamic social order’, through the Qu’ran and the sharia as guides to action. This is a goal Marxists oppose and will, if necessary, fight against arms in hand.

Petty-proprietor nationalism

The underlying problem is that fascism and colonial nationalism are both, ideologically, forms of petty-proprietor nationalism. Both politically represent the petty proprietors - peasants, small traders, artisans and small businesses - and the intelligentsia (petty proprietors of intellectual property). This class is in historical terms a class of the past. Its apogee was before capitalism, which tends to split it up into capitalists proper and wage-slaves (though there are counter-tendencies which mean that the petty proprietors remain an important class even in the most developed capitalist countries). The result is that petty-proprietor politics tends to look backwards with nostalgia to a lost golden age before the coming of capital. Hence the German nationalists looked to the Teutons who defeated Rome and to Frederick Barbarossa; the Italians to a revival of Rome. Hence islamism looks to the caliphate (sunni) or the imamate (shia). Within this context, petty-proprietor politics is opposed both to capital and to the working class.

The goals of petty-proprietor nationalism in general are utterly utopian. It aims simultaneously to restore the strength and autonomy of the nation, and to restore the old social order in which workers, women and youth ‘knew their place’. However, the global ascendancy of capital and hence of the imperialist powers flows from the greater productive capacity of the capitalist social order. The sharp edge of this is military production. If nationalists (islamists) wish to restore the strength and autonomy of the nation (the faith) they need to have an arms production capacity which can do more than merely irritate the imperialists (the crusaders). They will be driven towards maintaining industry, and thus a sort of semi-capitalist nationalism.

But as long as there is industry there will be a proletariat - and with it markets, which undermine household petty property, and a labour market, which undermines the old authority of husband, father and priest/imam. The petty-proprietor nationalists’ hatred of the capitalist destruction of the old social order will thus be displaced onto the proletariat. In this form nationalism - whether imperialist or colonial - becomes an agency of mobilisation of the petty proprietors and their lowest edge, the ‘criminal class’, against the proletariat. This aspect of petty-proprietor nationalism was transparent in the role of the catholic anti-semites in late 19th and early 20th century Europe and in their descendant, European fascism. But it has been equally visible in the destruction of the Communist Party in Indonesia at the hands of secular nationalists, and the modern role of the islamists in Turkey, in Algeria and most spectacularly in Iran since 1979. There are no doubt other colonial examples. As a result, if we urge the workers’ movement to give ‘critical support’ to nationalist (islamist) movements, we risk preparing a holocaust of the workers.

There is, however, another side to the coin. This is that because petty-proprietor nationalism is utopian, and because one aspect of its goals - an end to colonial or neo-colonial domination - is shared by Marxists, many individual militants and even whole groups have in the past been won from nationalism to Marxism. This was the origin of most of the communist parties in the colonial world. In a certain sense the seeds even of the Russian Bolsheviks came from Narodnaya Volya. If, however, we make a simple equation between forms of colonial nationalism and fascism, so that our only task in relation to the nationalists is to support anyone who fights them arms in hand, we rule out winning nationalists to Marxism.

How, then, to escape from this double-bind? There are two keys. The first is the distinction in our own tasks as communists and the tasks of the workers’ movement between tasks of persuasion and military tasks. The second is related to the first, and concerns the problem of united action where there is limited agreement and wider disagreement.

Peacefully if we can

“Peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must.” This phrase, taken (originally) from the left wing of the Chartists, can be found in this paper’s ‘What we fight for’ column. It expresses the fact that we do not prefer the course of violence. Even in Trotsky’s Terrorism and communism, which is almost a manifesto of the need for violence and majority-based terror in revolutions, we can find the following: “If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few weeks, after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in Germany, France and England, there can be no doubt that our revolution would have been the most ‘peaceful’, the most ‘bloodless’ of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth. But this historical sequence - the most ‘natural’ at the first glance, and, in any case, the most beneficial for the Russian working class - found itself infringed - not through our fault, but through the will of events” (emphasis added, www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1920/dictatorvs/ch04.htm).

The fact that we prefer persuasion to violence relates back to two points which I have already made. First: Marxist socialism - communism in its proper sense - is not about an enlightened minority reshaping the world. It is about the large majority taking control of our own lives collectively and individually. At present communists in this sense are a small minority everywhere. Our task, if we are to achieve our aims, is to persuade the majority.

Second: killing other people without very good reasons is wrong and is generally understood to be wrong. The core examples of generally accepted ‘very good reasons’ for killing are self-defence and the defence of others. These then provide the best grounds for communists, or the workers’ movement more generally, to use force. Suppose, for example, that communists won a large majority at an election and proceeded to create laws to bring in a radical-democratic republic, expropriate the major capitalists and so on. If no-one resisted these laws by force, there would be no reason to use force against anyone. In practice that is not very likely. The capitalist elite expect their ‘rights’ to be protected by force through the law. They already simply disobey the law where it suits them, such as when the law relating to the Sunday opening of shops was ignored on a large scale in the 1980s. They use force against strikers routinely overseas and occasionally in Britain, and would have little hesitation in doing so against a communist majority. At this point the use of force against them, up to and including civil war, would be a matter of self-defence.

It follows that even in relation to far-right nationalist organisations like the British National Party our primary tasks are tasks of persuading people who might vote for them that nationalism and racism do not represent a political alternative to the existing order. It is only insofar as they attempt to ‘conquer the streets’ or to terrorise workers’ or minority groups through organised violence (Combat 18, etc) that our tasks become those of forcible self-defence against them.

At the same time, we argue that the workers’ movement should place no trust in the capitalist state to protect it against the actual or potential violence of nationalists or reactionary forces. In all historical instances of nationalist violence, sections of the state security apparatus have been either actual participants in its organisation (as in Italy in the 1970s) or ‘friendly neutrals’ towards it. The workers’ movement needs - as I have already said - its own independent capacity for defensive violence.

Communists thus call for the workers’ movement to organise and train for self-defence (see, for example, Ian Donovan’s article on the miners’ Great Strike - Weekly Worker March 18). We fight for such self-defence organisations to grow into workers’ militia, and argue that “As the circumstances allow, the working class must equip itself with the most advanced, most destructive weaponry available” (Draft programme, §3.7, http://www.-cpgb.org.uk/documents/cpgb/prog_demands.html#3_7). Self-defence remains the starting point.

This reasoning applies with equal strength both in the colonial world and where what is involved is open war. The Chinese Communist Party under Mao rightly rejected Stalin’s advice that in the light of the Japanese invasion of China they should subordinate their independent armed forces to those of the Kuomintang nationalists. They fought against the Japanese alongside the Kuomintang, but independently of them. They were then in a position to fight against the Kuomintang when the Japanese were defeated. That the CCP itself became a peasant-based nationalist formation does not alter the fact that its judgment in the 1930s was right and Stalin’s wrong. Many years later, the CCP advised the Indonesian communists to subordinate themselves to the nationalists led by Sukarno. The result was that in 1965-66 the Indonesian communists were massacred in a military coup led by the right wing of the nationalist movement with the backing of the USA. But this does not mean, either in China in the 1930s or in Indonesia in the 1950s to early 1960s, that communists’ primary task was to fight the nationalists arms in hand. It was to endeavour to persuade as many as possible of them to come over to the workers’ movement, while still preparing, in case it became necessary, to take up arms against them.

This may seem to have taken us some way from our starting point. But the principles are equally applicable to jihadi islamist groups which practise terrorism. To the extent that these groups are attacking, or will attack, the workers’ movement or are attempting to take control of the streets, we fight for organised workers’ self-defence. We do not place trust in the existing capitalist states (eg, the US-UK occupiers of Iraq; let alone the US-UK’s ‘war on terror’ measures at home) to defend the working class against the islamists, etc. To the extent that we are not forced to fight them arms in hand, we endeavour to persuade them that their approach to politics is a dead end. Terrorist bombing operations, like 9/11, Bali and Madrid, fall into the first category. The workers’ movement needs to develop its own self-defence against these attacks. Unlike the US-UK’s ‘war on terror’, such a self-defence could be conducted within the framework of recognising the legitimate grievances against the US-led world order articulated by islamists, and fighting alongside them - but independently of them - against these grievances.

80-20, 20-80 (or 10-90)

The Socialist Alliance was widely said to operate on the basis of the ‘80-20’ principle: ie, that the groups and individuals of the socialist left should act in common on the 80% of ideas on which we agree, while discussing democratically (or, in one version, agreeing not to discuss) and, if necessary, acting independently on the 20% on which we disagree. The principle is transparently correct. It is commonly understood on the left also to apply to more limited campaigns - like the anti-war movement - where the participants in the campaign agree on much less. In this situation we can act together on the basis of, say, 10% agreement, while remaining free to argue and act separately on the remaining 90% of disagreement. The general principle is, in fact, the basis of any democratic political action.

It ought to be obvious that this approach applies equally to the parties of the petty bourgeoisie and even, in appropriate circumstances, of the bourgeoisie. Thus, for example, the Liberal Democrats turned out on the big February 15 2003 anti-war demonstration: quite correctly, no-one on the left suggested that the left should organise to try to drive them away by force. Equally, the Tories have engaged in demagogic opportunist opposition to top-up fees, and rebel Labour MPs have as a result found themselves going through the same voting lobby as the Tories. It is the Labour leadership, not the left, which has accused the rebels of betrayal by acting in common with the Tories. Under these circumstances, however, the class political independence of the workers’ movement is critical. We have to say, as loudly as possible: though we and the Lib Dems (or even the BNP) are both marching against the war, we do so for radically different reasons; though we and the Tories are both voting against top-up fees, their opposition is mere opportunism; and so on.

In other words, we can have episodic united action with people and parties who, strategically, we oppose, who represent classes opposed to the working class, and against whom, in other circumstances, we will fight arms in hand. But we have to combine this limited united action with vigorous political opposition and with warning the workers that our temporary and partial allies are not to be trusted, and that it may, in future, be necessary to use force to defend the workers’ movement against people who are now momentary allies. Equally, we have to combine it with a rigorous and consistent defence of the independent interests of the working class: which implies the right to organise, nationally and internationally, and the rights of women and youth as against petty-proprietor patriarchs. This approach applies to the islamists just as much as it does to other petty-proprietor parties.

The bulk of the left is startlingly unable to grasp this simple approach. The reasons for this inability are too complex for full discussion here. They include failure to think seriously about the interests of the petty proprietors as a class; dogmatic attachment to the ‘united front’ and ‘popular front’ categories used in communist debates of the 1920s and 1930s; and the poisonous effects of inner-party monolithism and petty-bureaucratic interests on the character of organisations’ alliances. A critical element, however, is the refusal to think strategically about how to achieve the positive goals of the workers’ movement. For example, for the SWP there is nothing but an endless succession of short-term tactics to build the SWP and a romanticised image of ‘revolution’; for the AWL all political judgments resolve into moral judgments made in complete abstraction from questions of what will not and what might work.

Both approaches in different ways reduce the tasks of the working class to ‘taking sides’ in relation to initiatives launched by parties and movements of other classes. In the case of the SWP this can have the superficial appearance of taking initiatives, where the SWP substitutes itself for left social democracy (Socialist Alliance), anarchists (Globalise Resistance), liberals (Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism) or ‘the anti-war movement’ (Respect).

Again, this may seem to have taken us some way from the question of terrorism. But this is not the case. The SWP’s and AWL’s judgments on jihadi islamist terror, with which we began, reflect exactly the same methods. Islamists are both misguided anti-imperialists (SWP) and utopian-reactionaries who if they obtained power would crush the workers’ movement (AWL). Communists need to fight both for united action with them in the very limited cases where it is possible, and to struggle against their politics and fight for workers’ self-defence organisations which could defeat any attacks they launch on the workers’ movement.