13.07.2005
Terrorism and the SWP Janus
Are the London 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 London bombings have seen another outpouring of talk about terrorism. Of course, since September 11 2001 we have been involved in the USA's global 'war on terrorism'; but individual large-scale terrorist outrages, like the Madrid train bombings, the Bali night club bombings and now 7/7 itself bring the question to the fore in news and analysis. On the left the last week has seen an argument between comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party about terrorism. This argument was sparked by the fact that, while Respect, the Stop the War Coalition and Muslim Association of Britain promptly condemned the London bombings, the SWP itself, once again, did not issue an outright condemnation, presumably because it is unwilling to appear to side with the oppressor and with the "real terrorists", Bush and Blair. The SWP is being pulled two ways and is clearly in the process of falling into complete incoherence. Its comrades have, either by accident or design, a Janus-like ability to speak with two voices and display two faces. One face, the one they want to show the public, is reformist and respectable: that is the one that in the name of Respect and the STWC condemns the bombings. However, it fools no one, except perhaps those who want to be fooled. Because the other SWP face, the one they want to show each other, is stony-hard and full of puffed-up pride, talking in terms of an 'anti-imperialist' unity and 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. Just as it did over 9/11, Bali and Madrid, this face does not condemn: it forgives, and says that the 50 deaths and 700 injuries were all the fault of Bush and Blair, and that anyway the term 'terrorism' has become meaningless. It might help to clarify our differences if we outline a few 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 Soviet Union 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 judgement 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 'shock and awe' pre-invasion pummelling 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. 1. 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. 2. The second is the use of hostage-taking and collective responsibility as means of controlling 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 (1) 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 (2) 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 (Alliance for Workers' Liberty). 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 London 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, when it came to Madrid at least, 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 judgements carry with them moral judgements. 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 judgements 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 judgements. 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, British 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 judgement on killing which is not purely pacifist involves a judgement 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 judgement on that action. Al Qa'eda There are those in the media like David Aaronovitch, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen who in the name of progressive politics say that al Qa'eda (and, indeed, Arab nationalist formations like the Iraqi Ba'ath party) are reactionary - in effect fascist - organisations. They therefore supported the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and the continued US-UK war against Iraqi sunni forces. This is more or less echoed by the AWL, with its steadfast refusal to call for the withdrawal of British troops. The main danger for them is political islam (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 primarily sees goals which Marxists would support. Both of these positions are profoundly wrong. 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 Koran 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 Koran 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 as communists and in 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. 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 judgement 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 terrorism' 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 7/7, Bali, Madrid and 9/11 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 terrorism', 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 l
Worker