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Terrorism: a Marxist Perspective Terrorism: A Marxist Perspective Dave Holmes 2 Terrorism: A Marxist Perspective Contents Different Types of Terrorism .......................................................5 Bourgeois terror..................................................................................................... 6 Colonialism & neo-colonialism.............................................................................. 7 Defending the revolution....................................................................................... 7 Russia: Terrorism or Proletarian Revolution? .........................11 Populist movement.............................................................................................. 12 The People’s Will.................................................................................................. 15 SR Party: the strategy of terrorism...................................................................... 15 Nature of our opposition to terrorism................................................................ 18 West Germany: The Red Army Faction ......................................21 ‘We must organise resistance’............................................................................. 22 ‘Give up, Ulrike!’................................................................................................... 23 Widespread debate.............................................................................................. 24 Death of Holger Meins........................................................................................ 26 1977: A year of dramatic events........................................................................... 28 Political balance sheet........................................................................................... 29 Conclusion............................................................................................................ 30 Appendix: Socialists Condemn Terrorist Outrage ...................31 Notes ...........................................................................................35 Resistance Books 2002 ISBN 187664625X Published by Resistance Books, resistancebooks.com Terrorism: A Marxist Perspective By Dave Holmes I’d like to begin with a juxtaposition of two events — one which took place just four months ago and the other a long time before. The first event took place on September 11 last year. A right-wing Islamic fundamentalist organisation opposed to the United States hijacked four planes. They were turned into guided missiles and crashed — with all their passengers on board — into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. In the event, only three planes got through; one failed to reach its target. The aim of the operation was to deal a spectacular blow to the prestige of the United States and inspire the Islamic world to rise up in support of the fundamentalist goals of the hijackers. As we know, the material damage was spectacular and the loss of life severe. Up to 4000 people were killed. The victims weren’t members of the US ruling class or its political-military leaders; they weren’t US military forces in action on some battlefield; they were largely ordinary working people. Clearly, for the perpetrators of this atrocity, the victims didn’t count; they were simply what their enemies in the Pentagon like to call “collateral damage” — unfortunate and regrettable but of no great consequence compared to the objective of the operation. The second event I’d like to consider occurred on January 24, 1878, in tsarist Russia. On that day in St. Petersburg a 28-year old woman named Vera Zasulich shot and wounded General Trepov, the notorious chief of the city’s police, who was also responsible for all the prisons in the region. In July the previous year he had ordered the flogging of a young political prisoner called Bogolyubov, arrested for participating This is the text of a talk presented to the Democratic Socialist Partyand Resistance educational conference in Sydney in January 2002. Dave Holmes is a member of the Socialist Alliance. 4 Terrorism: A Marxist Perspective in an unprecedented demonstration and sentenced to 15 years hard labour in the Siberian mines; he died the day after his flogging. At her trial, Zasulich explained her motives: I had heard that … Bogolyubov was flogged until he stopped groaning … that soldiers broke into the cells and dragged the protesting prisoners into the punishment cells … Furthermore among those imprisoned at that time in the House of Preliminary Detention many had already been in prison for three or three and a half years, many had become insane or killed themselves … All this seemed to me to be not punishment but outrage … it seemed to me that such things should not be suffered to pass without consequences. I decided that even at the price of my own ruin I had to demonstrate that such degradation of human personality should not be allowed to be inflicted with impunity … I could find no other way of drawing attention to what had happened … It is a terrible thing to lift a hand against a human being, but I felt I had to do it … I fired without aiming … [She had then immediately thrown the revolver down] I was afraid it might go off again … I did not want this.1 In the event, the jury freed her. Her acquittal was an absolute sensation in Russia and a big blow to the tsarist regime. Zasulich had to flee abroad. Both the September 11 attack and Vera Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov can be classified as political terrorism. But in their significance they are worlds apart. One was an act of callous violence, of complete indifference to human suffering, the act of people whose morality is clearly on the same degenerate level as the imperialist superpower they sought to attack. By contrast, Vera Zasulich’s courageous action was motivated by indignation against brutality; she abhorred violence but felt compelled to take a stand in defence of human dignity.n Different Types of Terrorism As socialists we fervently aspire to a society without violence. As Trotsky says in his frequently-quoted 1940 testament: “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.”2 This is our credo — this is what motivates us — but we know that the realisation of this goal requires a hard revolutionary struggle to replace capitalist society with socialism. How this struggle unfolds — whether it is peaceful or violent — does not fundamentally depend on us but on the ruling class. Will the imperialist bourgeoisie defend its rotten social order to the bitter end? Will it resort to violence and terror to resist the advance of the masses? We are not pacifists: we believe in the right of the people to defend themselves against the violence of their oppressors. All those struggling for a better world are necessarily forced to confront the question of violence — and terrorism — in its various forms. We can define terrorism as the use of fear-inducing violence by an individual, a political group or a social class to achieve some aim: it may be simply an act of revenge against injustice; an attempt to stimulate the masses to struggle and revolt; or an attempt to intimidate its opponents, to sap their will or ability to resist. The question of terrorism is inextricably bound up with the class struggle: that’s where it comes from. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that ever since the end of primitive communist society, history is essentially the history of the class struggle. And this history is full of violence and terror from above — by the ruling class — and also of terrorist acts from below — by the oppressed masses. Of course, terrorism is not the only form of political struggle but it is one of the most common, today and historically — and necessarily so. This talk is not a history of terrorism — that would be an impossibly huge task — but a selective look at the question. We can distinguish three broad categories of terrorism which are of particular interest to us, although this is by no means an exhaustive list. Firstly, there is terror from above, that is, state or government terror against the 6 Terrorism: A Marxist Perspective masses and their organisations, carried out either directly by the police and military or through the use of extra-legal gangs, death squads, etc. We could also include here, as a sub-category, terror from rightist groups who are trying to destabilise the political situation and bring to power a more authoritarian regime which they consider can better defend the bourgeois social system. Such groups may have ties to sections of the ruling class or the state apparatus. (For the sake of completeness, we should also mention here the police-state terror of the various Stalinist-bureaucratic regimes, now consigned to the rubbish bin of history.) Secondly, there is terrorism from below, that is, so-called individual terrorism. In Marxist terms this means radical groups pursuing a strategy of terrorist acts against the regime, hoping in this way to destabilise it or inspire the masses to rise up against it. This approach is counterposed to the Marxist strategy of mobilising the broad masses in struggle. Terrorism from below is not restricted to leftist groups — far from it, as we can see by even a cursory look at national struggles around the world. For instance, the conservative Palestinian Islamic group Hamas organises suicide bombers to penetrate Israel and blow themselves up along with anyone around them, usually
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