 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|  |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Terrorism: A Marxist Analysis The "War on Terror" and the Imperialist World Order Part One The Bush administration, supported by the Democrats in Congress, seized on the grief, anger and fear over the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to mobilize popular support for new military adventures abroad and intensified repression domestically. The torture chambers of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram; the rape and massacre of Iraqi villagers by U.S. troops in Haditha—such are the real meaning of the so-called “global war on terror.” On the home front, this “war,” initially directed mainly against immigrants from Muslim countries, has brought wholesale attacks against the rights of black people and the population as a whole. The Democrats gave Bush & Co. a blank check for the invasion of Afghanistan and largely supported the war against Iraq. Now they have recaptured Congress largely by promoting themselves as better able than the beleaguered Republicans to carry out the “war on terror,” calling for an “exit strategy” in order to cut U.S. imperialism’s losses in Iraq. Extricating military forces from the Iraq quagmire could allow the U.S. and NATO to augment their forces in Afghanistan. It would also give Washington more flexibility in pursuing its threats against both neocolonial Iran and the North Korean deformed workers state, and to pursue as well the imperialists’ strategic goal of capitalist counterrevolution in China. The September 11 attacks gave the U.S. rulers further fuel for their drive to label as “terrorists” all those who oppose their marauding around the globe and their trampling upon immigrants, black people and all working people at home. Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge warned West Coast ILWU longshoremen in 2002 that a port strike would be treated as a threat to “national security.” And a former U.S. secretary of education in the Bush administration called a major teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In Britain and elsewhere around the world, capitalist governments have followed Washington’s lead by implementing their own draconian new laws and further clamping down on immigrant populations. Those who administer the capitalist system, which has long ceased to play any progressive role, perpetrate mass terror and wanton, barbaric and premeditated slaughter on a ghastly scale. The unspeakable crimes against humanity that are synonymous with U.S. imperialism—from the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War to the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s—are intrinsic to the epoch of capitalism in its grotesque death agony. No less so are the brutal workings of capitalist “democracy” at home, from the killing of strikers and the pounding attacks on workers’ wages and living standards to the cop terror and mass poverty of the ghettos and barrios. We abhor the organized violence employed by the capitalist rulers in defense of their obscene profits. But Marxists are not pacifists. We understand that force is and has always been the midwife of revolutionary social transformation. All history demonstrates that those who rule class societies do not give up their power without bitter struggle. It will take nothing less than a series of thoroughgoing socialist revolutions to sweep away the capitalist-imperialist world order, the most murderous system of exploitation in human history. Nearly a century ago, Leon Trotsky, who would go on to become, along with V.I. Lenin, a central leader of the October Revolution of 1917, wrote in a 1911 article for the Austrian Social Democracy’s Der Kampf, reprinted in English in Intercontinental Press (6 August 1973) under the headline, “The Marxist Position on Individual Terrorism”: “Our class enemies are in the habit of complaining about our terrorism. What they mean by this is rather unclear. They would like to label all the activities of the proletariat directed against the class enemy’s interests as terrorism. The strike, in their eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of a strike, the organization of strike pickets, an economic boycott of a slave-driving boss, a moral boycott of a traitor from our own ranks—all this and much more they call terrorism. If terrorism is understood in this way as any action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the enemy, then of course the entire class struggle is nothing but terrorism. And the only question remaining is whether the bourgeois politicians have the right to pour out their floods of moral indignation about proletarian terrorism when their entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror!” Today, it is urgently necessary for the proletariat internationally to fight against every imperialist military adventure, every attempt to bolster capitalist repression in the name of the “war on terror.” This fight must include combatting the bourgeoisie’s lying equation of class and social struggle with criminal terrorist acts, for which an examination of terrorism both in its current context and in its historical development is necessary. September 11 and the Myth of “National Unity” The attack on the World Trade Center using two hijacked passenger jets was a criminal act in which several thousand people—white, black, Latino and foreign-born working people of many nationalities—were indiscriminately murdered. A third airliner went down in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard, and a fourth hit the Pentagon, killing 125 in addition to the passengers and crew. Unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That fact does not make the attack an “anti-imperialist” act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people—in this case passengers on the plane as well as maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon. The Pentagon, however, directs a military machine that deals out death and terror on a scale worlds beyond what the Islamic fundamentalists of Al Qaeda are capable of. The Pentagon is at the pinnacle of a set of institutions based on armed force—the military, the police, the courts and the prisons—that constitute the core of the U.S. capitalist state. The purpose of the bourgeois state is to defend by means of organized violence the political rule, property and global interests of a small layer of capitalists whose wealth derives from the exploitation of the working class at home and abroad. We noted in “Bush, the Democrats and the London ‘Terror’ Scare” (WV No. 875, 1 September) that “the terrorist followers of Osama bin Laden—Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster—and the like are responding in their own distorted way to the ravages of U.S. imperialism.” Terrorist acts such as the September 11 attacks represent the weak striking out at the strong. Nonetheless, America’s imperialist rulers waved the World Trade Center atrocity as a bloody shirt to further the lie of “national unity”—the notion that the exploited and oppressed have a common cause with their exploiters and oppressors. As a Spartacist League/U.S. Political Bureau statement issued the day after the attack stressed: “Those who perpetrated this horrific attack (and there is no evidence at all as to who that was) embrace the same mentality as the racist rulers of America—identifying the working masses with their capitalist exploiters and oppressors!” (“The World Trade Center Attack,” WV No. 764, 14 September 2001). From the outset, we have sought to mobilize the working class to combat the intensified state repression carried out in the name of the “war on terror.” In February 2002, the Partisan Defense Committee and Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense initiated a united-front rally in Oakland, California, supported by a number of unions, notably ILWU longshoremen, in opposition to the USA-Patriot Act, the Maritime Security Act and the anti-immigrant witchhunt. Through this exemplary action, we sought to demonstrate how a workers party would fight to mobilize labor in the defense of all the oppressed. “Terror” Witchhunts and State Repression In an amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on behalf of Jose Padilla—a U.S. citizen who was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2002, stripped of all rights and thrown into a military dungeon as an “enemy combatant”—the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee noted: “The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality.… Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population” (Class-Struggle Defense Notes No. 31, Summer 2003). Starkly illustrating the broad sweep of “anti-terror” measures were the prison sentences handed down in October to radical attorney Lynne Stewart, her translator, Mohamed Yousry, and legal assistant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar. For the “crime” of Stewart’s aggressive defense of her client, Islamic fundamentalist Sheik Abdel Rahman, the three were convicted on charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorism and to defraud the government, with Abdel Sattar convicted on additional conspiracy charges and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Thus their prosecutions represented a frontal attack on the right to free speech and the right to legal representation. And just this month, the Justice Department declared that an “anti-terrorism” law recently passed by Congress makes any immigrant accused of ties to a terrorist organization subject to indefinite detention as an “enemy combatant,” even if arrested inside the U.S. The U.S. rulers’ use of the “terrorist” label to kill or silence their perceived political enemies may have gained new momentum following September 11, but the practice goes way back. In Pennsylvania in the 1870s, the Pinkertons and vigilantes of the murderous coal bosses terrorized miners, while the bosses had leaders of the so-called “Molly Maguires,” Irish immigrant labor militants, framed up and hanged on charges of terror and murder. Fabricated charges of a terrorist plot served the political witchhunt against left-wing leaders of the eight-hour day movement, culminating in the execution of the Chicago Haymarket martyrs in 1887. During the radical turbulence of the 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of harassment and disruption was used against leftists, Vietnam antiwar activists and black militants. The Black Panther Party was a particular target for bloody destruction under both Democratic and Republican administrations: Some 38 militants were killed outright by the Feds and their local auxiliaries and many more framed up and imprisoned. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years behind bars and others remain entombed to this day, including former Black Panther Party spokesman and death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Spartacist League has long understood that the capitalist state’s attempts to tar its perceived opponents as terrorists pose a deadly danger for the left and labor movement as a whole. When we learned in 1977 that we had been included on the FBI’s ADEX (Administrative Index) hit list, which portrayed the SL as a violent conspiratorial group, we wrote: “The attempt to slander Marxism as some kind of violence cult is far more than an abstract anti-communist propaganda campaign. It is the cynical rationale for the ADEX file and the concentration camps which wait in the wings, for the FBI assassination squads that are the ultimate ‘disruption.’ It is an irony that this secret arm of the ruling class that has perpetrated the most massive organized worldwide violence should mount this attack on the ‘dangerous’ thought of the Marxist tradition. Not mere irony; it is historical perversity.” —“FBI Targets the Spartacist League,” WV No. 151, Using the same false definition of the SL contained in the (supposedly abolished) ADEX file, the 1983 FBI Domestic Security/Terrorism Guidelines redefined what had been deemed “subversive” activity as “terrorist,” authorizing investigation of left-wing organizations even though no crimes had been committed or even alleged. The SL successfully sued, compelling the FBI to withdraw its threatening “definition” and thereby concede that Marxist ideas and activity cannot be equated with violence, terrorism and criminal enterprise. In announcing our lawsuit, we declared: “We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!” —“Spartacist League Sues FBI,” WV No. 340, 21 October 1983 We had already successfully sued the state government of California in 1981, winning a retraction of the false and dangerous charges that we were “terrorists” and “criminals.” We warned, however, against any illusions that these legal victories meant the end of government terror, snooping, surveillance and dirty tricks against the left and workers movement. Reformists Promote Lie of “Liberal” Imperialism Marxists oppose individual terrorism as a political strategy, even that terrorism which is derived from real, if misguided, anti-racist or anti-imperialist impulses and takes as its target genuine institutions or agents of state repression (manifestly not the case in the attack on the World Trade Center). Such individual acts, however heroic in particular circumstances, are counterposed to the proletarian class struggle and the consciousness the working class needs if it is to stand at the head of the oppressed in the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist imperialist system. As Trotsky wrote in his 1911 article, in regard to the left-wing populist terrorists in late tsarist Russia: “In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission” (emphasis in original). Despite our political opposition to the strategy of terrorism, the International Communist League has consistently defended individuals and organizations targeted for bourgeois state repression for carrying out attacks against the class enemy. The SL/U.S., for example, has defended the Ohio 7, leftist activists who were convicted for their role in a radical group that took credit for “bank expropriations” and bombings in the late 1970s and ’80s against symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices. Two of the Ohio 7 remain in prison (see article, page 2). Likewise, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece call on the workers movement to defend the November 17 group against the Greek bourgeois state. Ward Churchill, a radical professor at the University of Colorado, argued in his September 2001 essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” that the September 11 attacks were a response in kind to the crimes of U.S. imperialism against the peoples of the Third World. As a consequence, he has been the target of a right-wing campaign to drive him and other critics of government policy off campus. As we have stated, Churchill must be vigorously defended against the McCarthyite witchhunt (see “Hands Off Ward Churchill!” WV No. 873, 7 July). Churchill denies any meaningful distinction between the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in what he sees as a counterstrike by oppressed and therefore good Third World peoples against the bad peoples of the First World. According to Churchill, all Americans collectively partake of guilt for U.S. imperialism’s crimes insofar as they have not fought to stop them. But far from being a “terrorist sympathizer,” as rightists outrageously contend, Churchill aims to shame American imperialism into cleaning up its act. And, as is typical of New Left-style radicals and nationalists the world over, Churchill’s outlook divides the world into good peoples and bad peoples rather than into opposing classes. Churchill does not pretend to be a Marxist and thus is at least consistent in disregarding the explosive class contradictions at the base of American society. Not so the reformist leftists who cover with empty socialist phrases what are in reality nothing but liberal bourgeois politics. “Gov’t Policy Puts People in Harm’s Way,” declared Workers World (27 September 2001) following September 11. “The military response to terrorism just perpetuates the cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism,” wrote radical-liberal professor Howard Zinn, uncritically quoted in the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist Worker (14 September 2001). These groups promote the illusion that imperialist militarism is a bad policy that can be eliminated from the capitalist system if sufficient pressure is applied. To this end, they seek to form a “coalition” with the liberal wing of the capitalist class, represented by a section of the Democratic Party. Contrary to the preachings of the reformist fake socialists, the capitalist state cannot be wielded by the exploited and the oppressed to serve their interests. In order to defend itself, the working class must mobilize independently of all the agencies and parties of its class enemy. In order to sweep away this ruling class and open the road to a world free of class exploitation, war and all forms of oppression, the working class must take control of society in its own hands through a socialist revolution that breaks up and destroys the capitalist state and establishes in its place a workers state based on a planned, collectivized economy. The political instrument needed to achieve this goal is a revolutionary workers party—a party that fights to win the U.S. working class to the understanding that, as part of the international proletariat, it must fight to defend all the victims of U.S. imperialism through struggle against their common enemy, the bloodstained U.S. capitalist rulers. The model for such a party can be found in the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the first and to date only successful workers revolution in history, the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The October Revolution and Red Terror The October Revolution overthrew the rule of Russia’s landlords and capitalists and established the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the impoverished peasant masses. Tsarist Russia had been the most backward of the major powers: imperialism had broken at its weakest link amid the carnage and economic devastation of the First World War, an interimperialist conflict for markets and spheres of exploitation. Acutely conscious that the Russian Revolution was a beacon of liberation for their own deeply exploited, war-weary and enraged workers and soldiers, the imperialists rushed to support the White counterrevolutionary armies of Russia’s old ruling classes with money and direct military intervention, including expeditionary forces from the U.S. and 13 other capitalist countries. The insurrection that had placed power in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies had been relatively bloodless, but the Civil War that ensued was bloody, indeed. The Revolution fought back, organizing the workers and their peasant allies into a disciplined fighting force: the Red Army built and commanded by Trotsky. A necessary auxiliary weapon in defense of the workers revolution against bourgeois and imperialist reaction was the Red Terror, including such means as the taking of hostages and the suppression of parties allied with the counterrevolution. The White counterrevolutionaries engaged in torture, mass rape and indiscriminate slaughter, putting entire (especially Jewish) villages to the torch. In contrast, even as it ruthlessly defended the proletarian state power, the Red Terror forbade the use of torture. The Cheka (Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage) proclaimed: “The proletariat is merciless in its struggle. At the same time it is unshakable and strong. Not a single curse at our most wicked enemies. No tortures and torments!” (see “U.S. Torture Machine,” WV Nos. 862 and 863, 20 January and 3 February). The Second International had collapsed at the outbreak of the world war as the leaders of the major West European social-democratic parties served as drummer boys and recruiting agents for their respective bourgeoisies. On the foundation of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist (Third) International was established in 1919, its aim being to lead the proletariat to power on a world scale. The main obstacles to winning revolutionary-minded workers to the Third International were not the openly chauvinist, right-wing leaders of the Second International but centrists such as the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, who prior to the war had been generally regarded as the main theoretical spokesman for “orthodox” Marxism. In a 1919 book titled Terrorism and Communism, Kautsky denounced the beleaguered Soviet workers state for the measures it was compelled to take to defend itself. Instead, he insisted, the workers should obey the rules of bourgeois “democracy.” Counterattacking Kautsky in a 1920 book also titled Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky drew on the history of the classic bourgeois revolutions in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, the abortive European revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War and the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 to demonstrate the necessity of revolutionary force in every significant advance in a class-dominated society. Referring not just to Russia but also to the revolutionary ferment that then convulsed Europe, especially the strategically key German working class, Trotsky wrote: “It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by forcing the bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too dangerous an undertaking for it to revolt against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine it by conspiracies, sabotage, insurrections, or the calling in of foreign troops…. “The man who repudiates terrorism in principle—i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the socialist revolution, and digs the grave of socialism.” Faced with the spectre of proletarian revolution, the “democratic” bourgeoisies unleashed an arsenal of brutal repression against the workers. In Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the rulers discarded the facade of “parliamentary democracy” and turned to the forces of military and fascist reaction. As Trotsky wrote against Kautsky, the fate of the revolution was determined by “an open measuring of forces between the capitalist clique, openly or secretly supreme and disposing of hundreds of thousands of mobilized and hardened officers, devoid of all scruple, and the revolting, revolutionary proletariat; while the intermediate classes were living in a state of terror, confusion, and prostration. Under such conditions, what pitiful nonsense are speeches about the peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat, by means of democratic parliamentarism!” Both the Bolshevik leaders and the Russian workers considered the October Revolution to be the first major victory in an unfolding world revolution. However, in no other country did the working class seize and consolidate state power. The main reason for this failure was the sabotage and treachery of the social-democratic misleaders and the absence of pre-existing, authoritative revolutionary vanguard parties such as Lenin had built in tsarist Russia. Erected amid a mass of peasant backwardness to begin with, by the early 1920s the young workers state had been bled white by seven years of imperialist war and civil war. The postwar revolutionary wave in Europe had receded, and Soviet Russia remained isolated, surrounded by hostile and more powerful capitalist-imperialist states. Under these conditions, beginning in 1923-24 the Soviet workers state underwent a bureaucratic degeneration, represented by the regime of J.V. Stalin. Decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, aggravated by the pressures of world imperialism, led in 1991-92 to the destruction of the USSR through capitalist counterrevolution. Counterrevolution in East Europe and the former Soviet Union—a historic defeat for the world proletariat—has brought devastation to the working people of those societies and emboldened the imperialists in their drive for global domination while fueling the resurgence of religious reaction throughout the world. U.S. Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism As it crowed over what it called the “death of communism,” the U.S. ruling class sought to find a surrogate for the “red menace” as a pretext for domestic repression and imperialist militarism. Today, Islamic fundamentalism, exemplified by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, is proclaimed to be the main global enemy of America and the American “way of life.” It has become common in both right-wing and certain liberal circles to speak of “Islamo-fascism.” Yet during the almost half-century-long Cold War against the former Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism allied itself with and actively supported the forces of Islamic traditionalism and those of other major religions of the East (as well as Catholicism, especially in Latin America, Poland and Latin Europe). In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who was later Secretary of State under the Eisenhower presidency, wrote: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [1968]). Despite its Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet Union—particularly Soviet Central Asia—was a beacon to all those in the backward East fighting for liberation from the twin yokes of imperialism and obscurantism. Hostile to social progress in any form, especially in regard to the position of women in society, the forces of Islamic traditionalism were bitter enemies of Communism (as well as secular democratic and nationalist movements). Moreover, in many countries the rising forces of Islamic fundamentalism, including the early Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, vied directly with the Communists and secular nationalists for a base among the dispossessed and downtrodden plebeian masses. In Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Indonesia, the Communist parties had a mass, working-class base. Iran in the early 1950s and Iraq in the late ’50s witnessed social explosions that could have placed the proletariat in power. But these revolutionary opportunities were betrayed by the Kremlin bureaucracy and its local Stalinist henchmen, who politically chained the masses to the forces of bourgeois nationalism (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000). These betrayals, as well as the palpable bankruptcy of “secular” bourgeois nationalism, cleared the ground for the later explosive growth of Islamic fundamentalism, which looks to install a theocratic state based on Islamic religious law (sharia) throughout the Muslim East. During the Cold War, U.S. imperialism was able to utilize the forces of Islamic traditionalism in its drive for complete domination of Near Eastern and other Muslim countries. In Iran in 1953, the Shi’ite clergy played a major role in the CIA-engineered coup that overthrew the bourgeois-nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadeq, which was supported by the pro-Moscow Tudeh (Masses) party, and installed the Shah in power. In Indonesia in 1965, Muslim generals, encouraged by Washington, overthrew the bourgeois-nationalist regime of Sukarno, which was backed by both Moscow and Beijing. The military, abetted by right-wing mobs led by Islamic clerics, massacred over a million workers, peasants, leftists and ethnic Chinese. The Maoist Indonesian Communist Party, then the largest such party in the capitalist world, was effectively wiped out. The most massive and sustained mobilization by U.S. imperialism of the forces of Islamic traditionalism and fundamentalism was in Afghanistan in the 1980s, directed against the Soviet Army and its modernizing nationalist Afghan allies, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The CIA organized and armed the Afghan mujahedin (holy warriors) who, among other atrocities, threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and shot schoolteachers for teaching young girls to read. In financial terms, this was the biggest CIA operation in the entire history of the Cold War. Washington recruited Islamist militants throughout the Near East and beyond to fight “godless Communism” in Afghanistan. In 1986, the CIA commissioned Osama bin Laden, son of a construction magnate tied to the Saudi monarchy, to help build a huge tunnel complex in Khost, which became his training camp and headquarters. In 1987, mujahedin in Khost used an American Stinger missile to shoot down a civilian airliner filled with Afghan schoolchildren. There was no outcry from Washington against Islamic terror then. It was only after they had served their purpose in the imperialist crusade against the Soviet Union that bin Laden & Co. went from being “freedom fighters” to “terrorists” in the eyes of the U.S. bourgeoisie. (For more detail, see “The 1998 Embassy Bombings, Osama bin Laden and the CIA: The Afghan Connection,” WV No. 761, 6 July 2001.) Most professed leftists around the world echoed the Western imperialist line of condemning the Soviet military intervention as a violation of Afghanistan’s “national sovereignty” and demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Some left groups, notably the Maoists, enthusiastically supported the CIA-armed mujahedin. Uniquely, the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) raised the slogans: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!” What was at stake in Afghanistan, which shared a 1,000-mile border with the USSR, was not only the military defense of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state against imperialism. This was the first war in modern history in which women’s emancipation was a central issue. The Soviet Army, whatever the motives and calculations of the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucrats, was fighting for social progress, especially the minimal democratic rights and freedoms of the hideously oppressed Afghan women, in this most wretchedly backward Islamic country. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 by the liberal Stalinist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev was a historic betrayal that paved the way to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union itself. Bin Laden Turns on U.S. Sponsors The U.S.-sponsored “holy war” in Afghanistan served to create a global Islamist network out of formerly disparate groups, while the Stalinists’ ignominious withdrawal emboldened the fundamentalists to think that they had defeated one “superpower” and could take on the second. A current of Islamic fundamentalism came to view the United States as intent on reshaping the Near East in its own image and according to its professed ideological precepts. Bin Laden was particularly outraged when the Saudi monarchy allowed U.S. troops to use the country, home to the holiest of Muslim holy sites, as a staging ground for the 1991 war against Iraq. In a 1997 interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett, he declaimed: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union in which the US has no mentionable role, but rather the credit goes to God, Praise and Glory be to Him, and the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, this collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant and it has started to look at itself as a Master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.” —quoted in Ashraf Tariq, “Osama bin Laden, No. 1 Terrorist in the World?” (2002) The jihadist groups of the post-Soviet period are in part a response to a perceived, but actually nonexistent, threat of the imperialists effecting the “Westernization” (the democratic rights and freedoms of women, the secularization of social and political life) of the Arab/Islamic world. Certainly, Islamist militants are also driven by intense hostility to the genuine crimes of American imperialism against the peoples of the Near East (support to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, the deadly effects of the economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s). However, it is the centrality of the reactionary religious component, especially the traditional degradation of women, that differentiates the Islamists from the various currents of Arab bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism. There is a certain ideological symmetry between the anti-Western jihadists and the Western liberal advocates of “human rights” imperialism like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. The Zionist Friedman supported the U.S. occupation of Iraq in order to supposedly establish a “model” of a “democratic and secular” society and polity in the heart of the Arab/Islamic world. The fact that the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie, the most prominent liberal intellectual opponent of Islamic fundamentalism from a Muslim background, became an ardent partisan of the Bush/Blair “war on terror” is also indicative of the changed political-ideological contours and divisions of the post-Soviet world. Friedman/Rushdie and bin Laden share the same illusory belief that the long-term goal of U.S. policy in the Near East is exporting “democracy.” The former support pursuing that supposed goal, including through military means; the latter opposes it, including through terrorist actions. But the imperialists’ aim is not to create secular democracies in the Near East or elsewhere in the Third World. At the most fundamental level, the evolution and structure of world capitalism have arrested the development of the countries of North Africa, the Near East and South Asia, which remain dependent on the North American, European and Japanese imperialists who dominate the world capitalist market. Imperialism thereby perpetuates the backward social, economic and cultural conditions that sustain Islamic traditionalism, while at the same time the penetration of backward countries by imperialist capital creates elements of a modern infrastructure and a proletariat. For the people of such societies, religion—especially the belief in an afterlife—is a needed solace for the seemingly unchangeable miseries and horrors of their earthly life. This situation is certainly not unique to the Islamic world: the U.S. has the highest degree of religiosity of any advanced capitalist country. In Marx’s famous phrase, religion is the “opium of the people”: “To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions” (emphasis in original, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” [1843-44]). And to eliminate that state of affairs requires a proletarian socialist revolution against capitalist imperialism. The popular appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is not merely ideological. Whether Sunni (like the Palestinian Hamas) or Shi’ite (like Hezbollah in Lebanon), the Islamist groups offer a large range of social services—job placement, health care, education, homes for the homeless, a living stipend for the unemployed, even day care—that the state is either unable or unwilling to provide. Thus these groups gain respect and consolidate support among the populace as the only institutions willing to even attempt to take care of the needs of the dispossessed and to stand up to corrupt and brutal pro-Western regimes. In the plebeian hovels around Cairo, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood is a state within a state. At the directly political level, a central and longstanding aspect of U.S. policy in the Near East has been to preserve and protect the Saudi monarchy in order to ensure continuing American control of the world’s largest oil fields. Over the decades, the Saudi monarchy has handed out vast sums internationally to promote movements based on the extreme Wahabi variant of Sunni orthodoxy as a counterweight to Communists and left-talking nationalists, and to check the spread of Shi’ite influence by the Iranian regime. It is, as they say, no accident that most of those who carried out the September 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia. Objectively, the Pentagon is the command center of the main military force in the world that ultimately maintains the socio-economic and political conditions nurturing Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. In understanding the current generation of militant Islamists, it is useful to look back at the Khomeiniite movement in Iran, which in 1979 overthrew the Shah, a major U.S. client regime in the region. At the time, most leftists around the world hailed Khomeini and the Shi’ite mullahs for leading a mass movement against American imperialist domination. We explained that the Islamic fundamentalist opposition to the Shah had nothing to do with anti-imperialism. Like all such fundamentalist forces, the Khomeiniite movement was committed to maintaining the system of private property. The Islamic opposition was not primarily a response to the Tehran regime’s close political and military ties to Washington but rather to its superficial “Westernizing” internal policies. As we wrote a few years after the so-called “Islamic Revolution”: “As long as the shah jailed, tortured and murdered Tudeh militants and even [bourgeois nationalist] National Front leaders, the Shi’ite clergy raised not a peep of protest. The Islamic (Khomeiniite) opposition dates from the 1963 ‘White Revolution’ when the shah began to make inroads into the mullahs’ endowments and property and its control over law and social mores. Then the mullahs organized huge protests against including mosque land under the agrarian reform laws and extending Majlis [parliamentary] suffrage to women.” —“Iran and Permanent Revolution,” Spartacist (English-language edition) We emphasized: “In Iran as throughout the Islamic East the symbol of the enslavement of women is the veil. And it was in defense of the veil, perhaps above all else, that Khomeini rose up against the shah’s cosmetic ‘Westernization’.” Today’s anti-Western Islamists sometimes claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed and downtrodden masses. But they do so in the interests of a reactionary program to entrench every form of exploitation and oppression, centrally the subjugation of women, on the basis of the same social and economic backwardness that secular nationalist regimes like Nasser’s Egypt and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq could not overcome. When Islamic fundamentalist regimes or movements come into direct military conflict with imperialist forces, we defend them against the latter. Thus we recognize the need of semicolonial Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons in order to counter imperialist military threats. Likewise, every blow struck against the U.S. and allied occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is a blow in the objective interests of the international working class. However, as is painfully evident from the intercommunal slaughter in Iraq, Sunni forces are far more likely to carry out criminal attacks against innocent civilians in the Shi’ite community, and vice versa. The Islamic fundamentalists, whether in power or in opposition, are implacable enemies of the workers and other toilers of all countries, especially their own. The road to a socialist revolution in the countries of the Islamic East, and with it the liberation of women, will require the political and in all likelihood military destruction of the forces of Islamic fundamentalism by the revolutionary proletariat and its allies.
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
