Terrorism: A Marxist Analysis

The "War on Terror" and the Imperialist World Order

Part Two

This part concludes this article, Part One of which appeared in WV No. 881 (24 November).

The concept of revolutionary terrorism entered the political vocabulary during the French Revolution of 1789-93, the most radical of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ushered in the modern capitalist world. The Jacobin regime of Maximilien Robespierre employed effective state repression, called “the Terror,” against domestic counterrevolutionaries backed by an international coalition of bourgeois-monarchical Britain and the absolutist (late feudal) monarchies of continental Europe.

The Englishman Edmund Burke became a leading ideological spokesman for the counterrevolutionary alliance against the embattled French Republic. In his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke denigrated this profound social and political upheaval as “frauds, impostures, violences, rapines, burnings, murders, confiscations, compulsory paper currencies, and every description of tyranny and cruelty employed to bring about and to uphold this revolution.” In the later epoch of capitalist imperialism, similar descriptions of the French Revolution, especially of its radical Jacobin phase, became a standard theme in bourgeois political culture.

During the Cold War, the vilification and falsification of the Jacobin Terror was incorporated into anti-Communist propaganda. Robespierre’s regime was portrayed as seeking to impose totalitarian thought control on the French people through massive police-state repression. In reality, the Jacobin Terror had nothing to do with the suppression of ideas and opinions. It was basically a military measure. Almost all of those killed during the Terror were concentrated in the two regions of France that experienced full-scale civil war: the lower Rhone valley around Lyon and the Vendée (an area in western France on the Atlantic coast). They were counterrevolutionary combatants who were captured arms in hand in a merciless civil war in which neither side gave quarter.

While repudiating its own revolutionary past, which included the beheading of kings in clearing away the old feudal order, the latter-day bourgeoisie has engaged in indiscriminate mass terror against the working class at home and the peoples of colonial and semicolonial countries. Following the defeat of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx called the first expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the French bourgeoisie massacred over 20,000 unarmed and defenseless men and women in the city’s working-class districts. In the foreign colonies of Western imperialism—such as British India, French Indochina and the U.S.-ruled Philippines—all popular national resistance was labeled “terrorism” and was met with mass murder and torture. If the U.S. ruling class were ideologically consistent, it would now condemn the American War of Independence against Britain, which relied heavily on guerrilla warfare, as a “terrorist enterprise.”

Today, it is we revolutionary Marxists who recognize the historically progressive character of the classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions as we struggle for a communist world in which the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the French Revolution will become a reality. During the Russian Civil War following the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks cited the historical examples of the French Revolution and also the American Civil War to explain and justify the Red Terror directed at the White counterrevolutionary armies and the Western and Japanese imperialist expeditionary forces. Leon Trotsky, commanding the Red Army, wrote at the time that “the iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was evoked by the monstrously difficult position of revolutionary France” and that the “severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances” (Terrorism and Communism [1920]). As a historical generalization, he concluded:

“The degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who have been overthrown, the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.”

Tsarist Russia: Revolutionary Marxism vs. Populist Terrorism

The October Revolution and the resulting Soviet workers state and Red Army were led by a political tendency that originated and developed in political combat against Russian populism and its strategy of individual terrorism. The founding leader of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, and his co-thinkers split from the main body of populist militants when the latter launched a campaign of assassinations of tsarist officials in the late 1870s in a futile effort to spark the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy.

As a political-ideological current, Russian populism had originated two decades earlier under the theoretical guidance of Alexander Herzen. Its core program was the advocacy of a peasant-based socialism supposedly expressing the traditional collectivist practices and values of Russia’s agrarian toilers. Following Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56 by Britain and France, the tsarist regime tolerated a certain degree of political openness amid expectations of far-reaching reforms. Taking advantage of this situation, Herzen and his circle aimed to pressure the autocracy into redistributing the land owned by the nobility and the state in a way beneficial to the peasant masses.

However, the legal abolition of serfdom in 1861 was devised such that it financially benefited the nobility while perpetuating and in some ways intensifying the exploitation and impoverishment of the rural toilers. Bitterly disillusioned with the tsarist “emancipation,” the populist intelligentsia moved leftward toward a revolutionary outlook. Over the next decade or so, populism gained a large following among Russia’s student youth, in competition with both Western-style liberalism and anti-Western Slavophile nationalism.

By the mid 1870s, the populist circles believed themselves strong enough to frontally challenge the tsarist regime and launched a campaign of mass agitation—the “To the People” movement—primarily directed at the peasantry. A few thousand young leftist intellectuals flocked to rural villages under the banner of “Land and Liberty.” However, their efforts were met with indifference and even hostility by the peasants, who continued to believe in the personal benevolence of the tsar. A few populist militants, prominent among them Plekhanov, remained in the cities, agitating and seeking to organize among urban workers. In this endeavor they achieved a certain measure of success, especially compared to their comrades who went to the countryside.

Frustrated by the failure of the “To the People” movement and enraged by the savage repression meted out against them by the tsarist regime, the main body of populist militants turned to terrorism, assassinating a number of government officials. Organized as the People’s Will, in 1881 they sent to his maker Alexander II, Tsar of All the Russias. This spectacular regicide did not, as they had expected, spark a popular uprising. Alexander III, an even more reactionary figure, ascended the throne and ushered in a wave of repression that destroyed the People’s Will and discouraged leftist political activism in general.

Plekhanov and a small number of co-thinkers refused to participate in the People’s Will, arguing for a continuation of mass agitational activity as opposed to individual terrorism. The other principal members of Plekhanov’s circle were Paul Axelrod and Vera Zasulich, who earlier had shot the tsarist General Trepov in 1878 in retaliation for his brutal treatment of political prisoners. Over the next few years, the circle, which functioned in exile, evolved toward Marxism, a development culminating in the formation of the Emancipation of Labor Group in 1883. These early Russian Marxists fought to win leftist opponents of the autocracy to a revolutionary program based on a materialist understanding that a social revolution requires a social class—i.e., the proletariat—with the interest and power to reorganize society on a new, more advanced economic foundation.

Beginning in the 1890s, Russia’s rapid industrialization, largely financed by West European capital, generated a powerful and combative proletariat in the midst of a backward, overwhelmingly peasant country with a weak and dependent bourgeoisie. The Marxist movement was able to transform itself from small propaganda circles of leftist intellectuals into a revolutionary workers party with a mass following, the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin. The forging of the Bolshevik Party was the product of many factors, including propaganda and agitation among the proletariat and other exploited and oppressed strata, the experience of both the revolutionary upsurge of 1905 and the subsequent period of deep reaction, and factional conflict inside the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, particularly the 1903 split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. In this period, Plekhanov moved to the right. Following the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, Plekhanov denounced the December Moscow insurrection as an adventure and, in 1917, opposed the seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led workers. Importantly, however, he never joined hands with those Mensheviks and others who tried to mobilize against the revolution.

SRs: Liberals with Bombs

Given Russia’s predominantly peasant character, populism continued to be an important current in the left opposition to the autocracy. Organized in 1901 as the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), populist militants competed with the Marxists for the allegiance of young leftist intellectuals and for influence among the urban laboring classes. The question of individual terrorism remained an important line of demarcation and source of political conflict between the two tendencies.

In 1902, when an SR militant assassinated the hated head of the political police, Dmitry Sipyagin, who was then replaced by the equally repressive Vyacheslav von Plehve, Lenin contrasted the assassination with a strike that had aroused the political consciousness of the railway workers in the port city of Rostov-on-Don:

“We believe that even a hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and these interests are discussed, and as this participation in a struggle, which really rouses ever new and ‘untapped’ sections of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader revolutionary struggle.”

—“New Events and Old Questions” (December 1902)

Lenin’s point was not simply that workers were engaging in struggle, but that the class struggle of the workers has revolutionary potential, which can be realized only through the forging of a revolutionary leadership. He went on to describe how the government is “truly disorganized when, and only when” mass workers struggles “plunge the government into a state of confusion…when military action against tens of thousands of the people is preceded by wavering among the authorities, who have no way of really knowing what this military action will lead to.” Lenin noted: “Here it is no longer some scoundrel, but the existing system as a whole that comes out as the enemy of the people, against whom are arrayed the local and the St. Petersburg authorities, the police, the Cossacks, and the troops, to say nothing of the gendarmes and the courts which, as ever, supplement and complete the picture in every popular uprising.”

A decade later, particularly in light of the experience of the failed 1905 Revolution and its aftermath, Lenin noted in “The Career of a Russian Terrorist” (January 1911) that the SRs included “an enormous proportion of liberals with bombs” (emphasis in original). He concluded:

“Those who want to learn from the great lessons of the Russian revolution must realize that only the development of the class-consciousness of the proletariat, only the organization of this class and the exclusion of petty-bourgeois ‘fellow-travellers’ from its party, and the elimination of the vacillation, weakness, and lack of principle, characteristic of them, can again lead, and surely will lead, to new victories of the people over the monarchy of the Romanovs.”

From the same revolutionary standpoint, Marxists solidarized with the desire of populist terrorists to avenge the crimes of the tsarist regime and defended them against state repression. In discussions with his U.S. supporters in the late 1930s, Trotsky recalled in this regard: “We rejected the method of the SRs; but every time a terrorist act was committed we declared that we sympathized with the SRs, we explained the reasons, and mobilized the feeling against the czar” (“Discussions with Trotsky: III—The Russian Question,” Writings [1937-38]).

Not long after Trotsky made these comments, a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death a Nazi diplomat. In opposition to the Stalinists, who refused to defend Grynszpan and vilely depicted him as an agent of the Nazis, Trotsky wrote:

“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road…. To tear Grynszpan out of the hands of capitalist justice, which is capable of chopping off his head to further serve capitalist diplomacy, is the elementary, immediate task of the international working class!”

—“For Grynszpan” (Writings [1938-39])

Decades later, a London Guardian (31 October 2001) article reported that the killing was likely the result of a homosexual lovers’ quarrel.

New Left Radicalism and Its Terrorist Fringe

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, left-wing terrorists such as the Russian populists and some anarchists professed as their ultimate goal an egalitarian, harmonious and stateless society. This outlook found an echo in the 1970s in certain terrorist groups derived from the broader current of New Left student-youth radicalism—the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany and Workers Autonomy and the Red Brigades in Italy. It’s a sign of the times that today terrorist acts are mainly carried out by religious and other retrograde forces and not by those seeking progressive social transformation.

New Left radicalism was in large measure a response to the parliamentary reformism and especially the pro-imperialist policies of the bureaucratized leadership of the mass working-class organizations—the AFL-CIO labor tops in the U.S., the social-democratic and Communist (Moscow-line Stalinist) parties and affiliated trade unions in West Europe. Many young leftist intellectuals believed that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” by the spoils of imperialist plunder of the “Third World.” A small number of New Left activists, frustrated by the ineffectuality of student-based protest politics, turned to individual terrorism, reinventing the classic anarchist “propaganda of the deed.”

The Weather Underground was the least politically significant and most technically incompetent of the New Left-derived terrorist groups. Their actions were often self-defeating and more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. An accidental bomb detonation killed three Weathermen in New York City in 1970. Nonetheless, the state repression and “anti-terrorist” witchhunt directed at the Weathermen posed an important challenge to the U.S. left as a whole. It should have been clear that when the heavy hammer of the bourgeois state came crashing down on the Weathermen, this was just a warm-up to go after the rest of the left and workers movement.

But most of the left, including self-styled “revolutionary Marxists,” refused to defend the Weathermen and indeed joined the witchhunting chorus against them. The pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party, in its eternal pursuit of a “People’s Front” with the Democratic Party, ranted that “Terror and Armed Battle Play into Nixon’s Hands” (Daily World, 15 April 1970). The Maoist-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party vilely denounced the Weathermen as “police agents.” The left social-democratic International Socialists (the predecessor of today’s International Socialist Organization) called on the left to “dissociate itself” from the Weathermen and compared them to fascists. And the reformist, once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), ripping quotes from Trotsky out of context, denounced “terrorism” as “petty-bourgeois liberalism temporarily gone berserk” (International Socialist Review, June 1970).

The SWP’s cowardly refusal to defend the Weathermen against state repression was prefigured by its cringing response to the 1963 assassination of Democratic president John F. Kennedy, which SWP leader Farrell Dobbs condemned as “an inhuman, anti-social and criminal act” (quoted in Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 1, February-March 1964). This line was characteristic of the SWP’s centrist degeneration at the time, against which the Spartacist League’s precursor, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), had fought.

The first issue of Spartacist, published after the RT’s expulsion from the SWP, described the Kennedy assassination as “an acid test of the class position of every left movement in the United States” and condemned “those formations which joined their cries to the liberal threnody for the late president.” The RT cited and solidarized with the principled line of the British Socialist Labour League, whose National Secretary, Gerry Healy, stated: “Marxists express no sympathy whatsoever over Kennedy’s death. We do not condone the act of individual terror responsible for his death, not because we are squeamish or humanitarian about how it was done, but because individual terror is no substitute for the construction of the revolutionary party.” Our article noted that “it is a perfectly principled tactic to carefully avoid the use of provocative phrases when the legal organizational existence, and possibly the lives, of revolutionaries are at stake,” but the SWP’s words were those of “Social Democrats and bourgeois liberals, and richly merited the attacks of Gerry Healy and the Socialist Labour League.”

When the Weathermen came under state attack a few years later, we insisted that they were “an integral part of the radical movement”:

“Legal defense of all radical activists victimized by the bourgeois state is necessary not only to protect the movement as a whole but also to establish the authority of the revolutionary left to set the Weatherman followers straight….

“The real crime vis-à-vis terror politics and heroic individualism is that it allows the revolutionary energies of some of the movement’s most talented, dedicated people to be channeled into futile and self-destructive actions. It is our job to seek to redirect these energies into genuinely revolutionary directions.”

—“Terrorism and Communism,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 17-18, August-September 1970

New Left Terrorism: West Europe

New Left-derived terrorist groups also arose in West Europe. In West Germany, the Red Army Faction, labeled by the bourgeois media the “Baader-Meinhof Gang” after two of its leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, engaged in bombings and arson, especially of corporate buildings and NATO military installations. The Bonn government, the legal heir of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, imprisoned more than 200 alleged RAF members and supporters, many of them held without trial for years in solitary confinement. At the time, our comrades of the Trotskyist League of Germany (predecessor of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany) energetically campaigned for united-front defense of the victimized Red Army Faction by the left and workers movement.

In 1977, more than a year after Meinhof’s suspicious death by hanging in her prison cell, the RAF kidnapped the head of the West German manufacturers association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, who was a former Nazi SS officer. The resulting massive buildup of state repression sought to intimidate the bourgeoisie’s real adversaries, the organized working class and those who would lead it in struggle against the capitalist system. However, under the impact of the intensifying “anti-terrorist” campaign, many German left-wing groups simply read the RAF out of the movement in order to escape the obligation of defending them.

At around the same time, self-proclaimed RAF supporters also got into the business of hijacking airliners, sometimes in alliance with Palestinian nationalists. In 1977, four terrorists claiming sympathy with the imprisoned RAF leaders hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Mogadishu, Somalia, where it was eventually stormed by West German commandos. The hijackers doused the passenger compartment with gasoline and repeatedly threatened to set it ablaze. Such acts target people who have nothing to do with the repression supposedly being protested.

While we continued to defend the RAF against its banning by the state, we did not defend the perpetrators of the airliner hijacking, which we denounced as a criminal act from the standpoint of the proletariat. We contrasted this with the Schleyer abduction, which “no matter how foolish, politically wrong and counterproductive—was not an act of indiscriminate terrorism against innocent individuals which must be condemned by the entire left” (WV No. 178, 21 October 1977). A similar situation arose in the U.S. in 1975, when the Puerto Rican FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) bombed the Fraunces Tavern restaurant in New York City, killing four and injuring more than 60 diners, elderly Italian waiters and passers-by. While the Spartacist League has consistently defended armed Puerto Rican nationalist groups such as the Macheteros and the FALN against state repression, we condemned the Fraunces Tavern bombing as a criminal act of indiscriminate terror.

Left-wing terrorism played an especially important and polarizing political role in the 1970s in Italy. Workers Autonomy, an amalgam of declassed intellectuals and lumpenized elements, advocated and practiced “diffuse terrorism” aimed at promoting semi-clandestine urban guerrillaism. More important and tactically effective were the Red Brigades, many of whose leaders and cadre were dissident “hard” Stalinists who had split from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in opposition to its abject reformism and servile class collaborationism. Nonetheless, the Brigades in substance acted as a left pressure group upon the PCI, whose leadership, meanwhile, did everything in its power to inflame the climate of “anti-terrorist” hysteria.

We wrote in “Stop the Popular-Front Witchhunt in Italy!” (WV No. 232, 25 May 1979):

“To their shame, virtually the entire Italian ex-New Left milieu has fallen into step with the PCI’s ‘anti-terrorist’ hysteria. But as the centrists howl with the wolves, genuine revolutionaries continue to defend the left against the capitalist state while warning against the Red Brigades’ suicidal program of individual terror….

“Italian revolutionaries must also conduct a relentless struggle against the ‘diffuse terrorism’ of Workers Autonomy and the ‘armed party’ of the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups…. Such a struggle is, in the present phase, essentially a political struggle, consisting of presenting to the masses of workers, students and unemployed a Leninist-Trotskyist party with a proletarian-revolutionary program to sweep away the bankrupt Italian bourgeoisie.”

Terrorism and Nationalism

In the present-day world, the politically significant practitioners of individual terrorism (aside from the Islamic jihadists) have been petty-bourgeois nationalists based on and claiming to struggle on behalf of oppressed peoples—Irish Republicans, Basque and Palestinian nationalists, for example—who aim to establish their own bourgeois nation-state. Such movements have always combined, in the words of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), “the armalite and the ballot box,” wielding armed struggle along with diplomatic maneuvers and appeals to the “democratic” pretensions of the imperialists as pressure tactics. In the radically altered political contours of the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had acted as a counterweight to the imperialist powers, these petty-bourgeois nationalist formations no longer have the diplomatic, military and financial means they had before and have been compelled to accept neocolonial-style “negotiated solutions”: the Oslo Accords in the case of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Good Friday Agreement in the case of the IRA.

We support the just struggles of oppressed nations and peoples against the forces of the oppressor bourgeois states. More fundamentally, we fight to eliminate all forms of national oppression, from a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist perspective. Thus we call for British troops out of Northern Ireland as an integral part of our program for an Irish workers republic within a federation of workers republics in the British Isles. We stand for the right of the Basque people to self-determination, i.e., to secede from the Spanish and French bourgeois states and establish their own nation-state. We demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli military forces and settlers from all of the Occupied Territories.

We do not equate the nationalism of the oppressed with the nationalism of the oppressor. It is the duty of the working class of an oppressor nation to defend the oppressed nation or nationality. A nationalist outlook and program, however, whether of the oppressed or the oppressor, aims to consolidate a national framework of bourgeois rule. In the eyes of petty-bourgeois nationalists, the entire oppressor nation is viewed as the enemy. This outlook frequently leads to acts of indiscriminate violence against the working people of the oppressor nation. Terrorism in the service of a nationalist program thus cuts across the class unity of the workers in the struggle against their common enemy: the capitalist classes of all nations. If and when it comes to power, the bourgeoisie of a formerly oppressed people gains a free hand not only to exploit its “own” working class but to oppress national minorities in its own territories and to launch its own wars of national conquest. The logic of all nationalism is genocidal.

An early example of such genocidal logic was provided by the Armenian Dashnaks in late tsarist Russia. At the time, the Armenian people were oppressed and divided between Ottoman-ruled Turkey and the Russian-ruled Caucasus. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) was founded in the early 1890s with the aim of liberating the Armenians in Turkey from the yoke of the Ottoman rulers. Subsequently, the Dashnaks adopted a formal socialist program and in 1907 joined the Second International. In Turkey, the Dashnaks carried out a policy of assassinating Ottoman officials and military men. In the Caucasus, however, the main target of the Dashnaks’ terrorism was another oppressed people, the Turkic-speaking, Muslim Azerbaijanis who many (Christian) Armenians viewed as sympathetic to the Muslim Ottoman rulers.

The Caucasus was (and still is) a region of numerous geographically intertwined peoples. The working class in the region’s main industrial city, Baku—the oil-producing center of the Russian empire—was thoroughly multinational. Its main components were ethnic Russians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, including migrants from Persia (Iran), and smaller numbers of other Caucasian peoples. National divisions corresponded to the vertical structure of the working class. Armenian capitalists typically employed only Armenian workers. Russians and Armenians were concentrated among the more skilled workers in the factories and refineries of the city itself. Azerbaijanis provided the mass of unskilled workers in the outlying oil fields.

In 1905, following murderous riots between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Baku, the Dashnaks formed militias, financed by Armenian capitalists, that carried out a campaign of mass terror against effectively defenseless Azerbaijani villages:

“The Dashnaktsutiun as a party bears a major portion of responsibility, for it was often the leading force in perpetrating the massacres. The Dashnaks organized bands similar to those which operated in Turkey and recruited mostly from the Armenian refugees from that country. Such bands would attack the Muslims and often exterminate the populations of entire villages.”

—Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917-1921 (Philosophical Library, 1951)

During the First World War, the Turkish rulers carried out a genocidal campaign against the Armenian people, whom they viewed as supporting their tsarist Russian enemy. Those who survived the massacres fled to the Caucasus, where the Dashnaks established their own short-lived bourgeois state during the Russian Civil War. These Armenian nationalists in power allied themselves with the British and French imperialists against the Soviet regime while waging border wars against the Azerbaijani and Georgian peoples.

Terrorism and Interpenetrated Peoples

The genocidal logic of nationalism is particularly acute when two different peoples interpenetrate on the same territory. This was and is the case in the Caucasus, as it is in Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine. In such situations, there is no democratic solution under capitalism to the contending democratic rights of national self-determination. While opposing all aspects of national oppression, we recognize that these conflicting claims can only be equitably resolved within the political framework of proletarian class rule, in which the capitalist drive for national consolidation in the service of profit has been eliminated.

The Northern Irish statelet was created by the British imperialists in the early 1920s as a reactionary move against the consolidation of an Irish bourgeois national state encompassing the entire island. An Anglo-Scottish-derived Protestant majority dominates and oppresses the Irish Catholic minority. For decades, the IRA carried out a semi-underground military struggle in the name of defending the Irish Catholics against the British imperialist forces and the Protestant authorities and paramilitary groups. However, the IRA’s program calls for reunifying, necessarily by force in the case of the Protestants, the six counties of Northern Ireland with the southern Catholic clerical Irish bourgeois state. If achieved, this would simply be a reversal of the terms of oppression, leading to communalist slaughter and forced population transfers.

The internationalist unity of the working class throughout the British Isles requires a struggle against British imperialism and all manifestations of national chauvinism and oppression. Thus Marxists stand for the military defense of the Irish nationalist organizations in their conflicts with the British army, the Northern Ireland state forces and Protestant paramilitary groups. At the same time, we oppose and condemn communalist attacks by the IRA on the Protestant population as well as indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in Britain. Such attacks are crimes against the whole working class.

In 1972, the Official IRA set off a bomb outside the officers’ mess in the Aldershot barracks in England, headquarters of a parachute regiment that had just carried out the heinous “Bloody Sunday” massacre of Catholics in the city of Derry. In fact, none of the officers were in the mess hall when the bomb went off. Those killed were women cleaners, an elderly gardener and a Catholic priest. In most such terrorist acts, innocent civilians are among those killed. But the bomb attack on a British imperialist military base was not a criminal act from the standpoint of the working class.

Altogether different was the Provisional IRA’s 1993 bombing of a fish shop on Shankill Road in a Protestant, mainly working-class neighborhood of Belfast, which killed nine Protestant civilians, including two children and the daughter of the shop’s owner. The Provos alibied this atrocity by claiming that they were trying to hit a Protestant paramilitary group scheduled to meet above the shop. Nonetheless, the targets of the bombing were not enforcers of national oppression but rather ordinary working people on this busy shopping street. Furthermore, this act of communalist terrorism took place at a time when a number of Protestant workers had just gone on strike to protest the sectarian murder of a Catholic worker. This offered a rare and fleeting opportunity for joint Catholic-Protestant, anti-sectarian working-class action. The Shankill Road bombing shut off that possibility by provoking vengeful rage within the Protestant community.

Nowhere has the reactionary logic of nationalist terrorism been drawn out more thoroughly than in the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likewise involves two nations interpenetrated on the same territory. The creation of the Israeli state in 1948 was achieved through the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland amid massacres by Zionist military forces—the mainstream Haganah, dominated by “socialist” Zionists, and the right-wing Irgun. This was the culmination of a decades-long crusade to carve a “Jewish state” out of the living flesh of the Arab people, who were interspersed with the Jewish settler communities in the then British-ruled colony of Palestine. Though often dressed up in the rhetoric of socialism, the Zionist project called for compacting an exclusionist, Jewish-dominated political economy based on the chauvinist appeal for “Hebrew labor only.” Thus it was bitterly hostile to every instance of Hebrew-Arab class unity and joint class struggle in Palestine between the 1920s and ’40s, notably among railway, harbor and oil refinery workers.

For example, in early 1947 Jewish and Arab oil refinery workers went on strike together in the major port city of Haifa (see Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 [University of California Press, 1996]). Later that year, Irgun terrorists carried out a bomb attack against a crowd of several hundred Arabs at the main gate of the Haifa refinery, where they were seeking jobs as day laborers. Infuriated Arabs then invaded the refinery and attacked Jewish workers. Using this communalist violence as a pretext, the Haganah retaliated against the entire Arab population of Haifa. Over the next few months, 50,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes in the city. This was but a part of the massive “ethnic cleansing” that established the state of Israel. Yesterday’s terrorists became the heads of the Israeli bourgeois state, among them: Yitzhak Rabin, who as an officer during the 1948 “War of Independence” directed “Operation Dani,” one of the bloodiest massacres of Palestinians; Menachem Begin, former commander of the Irgun; Yitzhak Shamir, an operative in the murderous Stern Gang in the 1940s.

Ever since the creation of their state, the Zionist rulers have labeled as “terrorism” all resistance by the dispossessed Palestinian people, from the professed secular nationalists of the late Yasir Arafat’s PLO to the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas. Just as the American imperialists in effect created and supported bin Laden’s Islamic terror network during the Cold War, so the Israeli rulers initially promoted the formation of Hamas in the 1980s as a counterweight to the PLO, which then had Moscow’s diplomatic backing. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, Arafat & Co. made a U.S.-brokered deal with the Israeli rulers—the 1993 Oslo Accords—to police the Occupied Territories on their behalf. The subsequent political bankruptcy and increasing corruption of the PLO led to the ascendancy of the reactionary Islamists of Hamas among the besieged and desperate Palestinian people.

We take a side militarily in defense of the Palestinians against racist Zionist terror, defending Hamas, as we have the PLO, when the Israeli state goes after it as part of its attacks on the Palestinian people. But we oppose the suicide bombings directed at random Israeli citizens in restaurants or shopping malls by Hamas (or by “secular” Palestinian nationalists), which strengthen the Zionist state by reinforcing the intense anti-Arab chauvinism and bunker mentality that pervade Israeli society. Marxists must struggle to break the Hebrew-speaking workers from the Zionist rulers. The only way out of the bloody dead end of the conflicting nationalisms in the region is class struggle uniting the proletariat across national lines in a fight to overthrow the Zionist butchers, the sheiks, colonels, emirs and mullahs in order to establish a socialist federation of the Near East.

What is needed to lead such struggles are revolutionary, internationalist workers parties based on the principle of the political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois-nationalist and religious forces. Such parties can only be forged through a sharp break with the class collaborationism that defined the Stalinist Communist parties. Most Communist parties in the Near East emerged beginning in the mid 1930s when Stalin’s Comintern adopted the policy of the “people’s front against fascism,” a formula for supporting “democratic” imperialism and other “progressive” bourgeois forces. In the colonial and semicolonial world, this meant subordinating the proletariat to bourgeois nationalism.

U.S. Imperialism on the Rampage

The current “global war on terror” is but one of the many facets of capitalist reaction that has stamped the world following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the homeland of the Bolshevik Revolution. That event was an enormous setback in the struggle for the liberation of humanity from exploitation and oppression. It has meant a sharp, although uneven, retrogression in consciousness among the working class and youth fighting for social justice and against imperialist war; it has led to a vast increase in immiseration among the toiling masses globally; and it has created a far more dangerous world.

Proclaiming themselves masters of the “world’s only superpower,” the U.S. rulers believe that they can achieve total global dominance through the threat and use of overwhelming military force. The UN-endorsed economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of a million and a half people, mainly young children and the elderly. The U.S./NATO air war against Serbia in 1999 devastated that small Balkan country. The “war on terror” has given an additional impetus to the ravages of American imperialist militarism around the world, from the invasion and colonial-type occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to Washington’s economic warfare combined with threats of military action against both neocolonial Iran and the North Korean bureaucratically deformed workers state.

But the intensification of exploitation and oppression sows the seeds of class and social struggle, and with that the raw material for new Octobers. The task of Marxists is to provide a program to burst U.S. imperialism from within, through proletarian revolution. We fight to render the proletariat conscious of its historic mission to act as the gravedigger of the capitalist system. Thus as part of our military defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against the U.S.-led occupations, we have called on the American proletariat to wage class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home.

Individual terror, no matter how well-intentioned or heroic, is no substitute for the revolutionary mass mobilization of the working class and its allies. However, in opposition to pacifistic liberals and reformist leftists, we understand that the rapacious and murderous capitalist class can be removed from power only through force. As we wrote many years ago in “Marxism and Bloodthirstiness” (WV No. 345, 6 January 1984):

“We are for the victory of just causes. Necessarily and above all, the centrality of just causes is the shattering of the exploiting and oppressing classes and the victory of socialism. We are socialists not least because we are passionately opposed to war, the gathering together of large numbers of young workingmen to be slaughtered in the interests of the rulers. In this savagely class-divided world, dominated by the mass murderers of My Lai, the struggle for the victory of just causes will have a big physical component. We must stand therefore for the maximum assembling of effective force on the just side, hopefully to demoralize and deter the forces of reaction so that the actual casualties are minimized.”

Such force is a necessary means to achieve communism’s ultimate goal: the creation of an egalitarian and harmonious society of material abundance, in which there is no longer any form of the organized violence that is inherent in the capitalist-imperialist world order based on exploitation and oppression.