The abiding image of the 2005 Labour Party conference is not of rousing speeches by the party leaders, nor of the latest episode in the Blair-Brown soap opera. It is of 82-year-old party member and refugee from Nazi persecution, Walter Wolfgang, being forcibly ejected from the hall after shouting “nonsense” at Jack Straw when the latter was pontificating about Iraq. Later, Wolfgang was prevented from re-entering the conference with the Prevention of Terrorism Act being used against him.
Despite an official apology, this incident has led many in the party to lament that Labour under Blair has been hi-jacked by control freaks, that it’s no longer the party it once was. The Guardian (1.10.05) published letters comparing Wolfgang’s treatment to the way Old Labour used to do things. KE Smith of Huddersfield gets quite wistful about it: “Does anyone remember (Harold) Wilson’s way of responding to hecklers? He would let them have their say and then launch an intelligent and pointed reply. Wilson was not only a very witty man but also a profoundly democratic Labour prime minister who avoided being dragged into a misguided US-led war”.
The next letter, however, puts a rather different slant on these Good Old Days. It’s from family members of the old anarchist campaigner, Nicolas Walter:
“There is nothing new in the treatment meted out to Walter Wolfgang, and nothing new in the intolerance shown by New Labour to anti-war protestors. In 1966 Nicolas Walter heckled Harold Wilson during the Labour Party conference in protest at the support given by the UK government to US behaviour in Vietnam. He got as far as shouting ‘hypocrite’ before being bundled out. He was arrested and charged with ‘indecency in church’ – Harold Wilson was speaking in a church, which gave him protection under the 1860 Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Act. The only difference is in the legal justification given for this absurd and heavy-handed suppression of hecklers. In those days, it was even more heavy-handed. Nicolas Walter was imprisoned for two months”.
A timely reminder that The Good Old Days of Labour as a working class and socialist party are no less mythical than the Garden of Eden. If ‘Old Labour’ means the days of Wilson and Callaghan, then it was Old Labour which confronted the striking seamen in 1966, which maintained Britain’s role as loyal lieutenant of US imperialism, not only in Vietnam but all over the globe, and which in 1969 wanted to crush working class resistance through the In Place of Strife proposals. These prefigured Tory legislation on strikes and solidarity action and were only withdrawn when the unions agreed to police workers’ actions more forcefully. It was Old Labour in partnership with the unions that brought in the Social Contract which cut wages and, along with attacks on the public sector, provoked the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1979.
But then maybe the real Good Old Days were the 1930s and 1940s, when the Labour Party and especially its left wing led the fight against appeasement, championed anti-fascism, and then, after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, rewarded the working class by nationalising the mines and the railways and brought in the National Health Service? Wasn’t the Labour party a true socialist party then?
Yes, if you swallow the line that socialism means defending the national interest in imperialist wars, if it means state control of a capitalist economy, if it means ruthlessly suppressing any independent movement of the working class as a threat to the war effort or the post-war reconstruction. Labour in the 1930s and 40s was a crucial asset for the capitalist system. It alone could mobilise workers for a second round of im-perialist butchery by peddling the lie that the only way to oppose Hitlerism was for workers to line up with their own capitalist state. It alone could introduce the post-war ‘reforms’, such as the NHS, which could put the lid on working class discontent after six years of sacrifice. And it alone could bring in the state capitalist measures needed to shore up Britain’s ailing economy during the reconstruction period. This was the ‘true socialist’ party which committed Britain to developing nuclear weapons as part of the US military bloc, which defended the remains perialist butchery by peddling the lie that the only way to oppose Hitlerism was for workers to line up with their own capitalist state. It alone could introduce the post-war ‘reforms’, such as the NHS, which could put the lid on working class discontent after six years of sacrifice. And it alone could bring in the state capitalist measures needed to shore up Britain’s ailing economy during the reconstruction period. This was the ‘true socialist’ party which committed Britain to developing nuclear weapons as part of the US military bloc, which defended the remains of the Empire in Malaysia, Aden and Palestine, and which sent in troops to break strikes by dockers and other workers who were not prepared to tamely accept the demands of post-war austerity.
But what about the adoption of Clause Four in 1918, didn’t that commit the Labour party to socialism, and wasn’t it a terrible betrayal of party principles when it was ditched under New Labour?
This is what a real socialist paper of the time, Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought, had to say about the role of the Labour in the wake of the First World War:
“The social patriotic parties of reform, like the British Labour Party, are everywhere aiding the capitalists to maintain the capitalist system; to prevent it from breaking down under the shock which the Great War has caused it, and the growing influence of the Russian revolution. The bourgeois social patriotic parties, whether they call themselves Labour or Socialist, are everywhere working against the communist revolution, and they are more dangerous to it than the aggressive capitalists because the reforms they seek to introduce may keep the capitalist regime going for some time to come. When the social patriotic parties come into power, they fight to stave off the workers’ revolution with as strong a determination as that displayed by the capitalists, and more effectively, because they understand the methods and tactics and something of the idealism of the working class” (21 February 1920).
‘Social patriotic’ was a term used by revolutionaries at the time to describe those parties or political tendencies which had helped to recruit the working class for the capitalist war of 1914-18, above all by claiming that dying for King and Country was somehow in the interests of socialism and the working class. The Labour Party had played the role of recruiting sergeant with enthusiasm. This was the decisive moment in its passage from the working class to the bourgeoisie, and when a party takes that fateful step, there is no going back. As the Dreadnought said, the social patriots proved this during the revolutionary upheavals that were provoked by the war. In Germany, in 1918-19, the Social Democratic Party openly acted as the bloodhound of the counter-revolution, using the army and proto-fascist gangs to crush workers’ uprisings and assassinate revolutionary militants like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Britain, the Labour Party was faced with massive unrest, but not open revolution. Its response was to try to neutralise the “growing influence of the Russian revolution” by offering a fake socialism which did not call for the destruction of the capitalist state and which did not criticise the fundamentals of capitalism: wage labour and production for the market. Clause Four, calling for the nationalisation of the economy by the existing state, was an ideological sop to the workers, while at the same time proposing nothing more radical than the ‘war socialism’ which the capitalist states had already adopted in order to engage more effectively in the imperialist carnage.
If the Labour Party definitively became an adjunct of the capitalist state in 1914, that doesn’t mean that it had enjoyed a true Golden Age prior to the war. It had been formed during the mid-1900s as the political wing of a trade union machinery that was itself being more and more incorporated into the capitalist system. At a time when the growth of opportunism was becoming a real plague in the international workers’ movement, preparing the ground for the betrayal of 1914, the working class in Britain did not need a new opportunist party, but one that would defend the internationalist and revolutionary principles of socialism. The Russian revolution of 1905, which saw the first workers’ soviets, had shown that a new epoch in the class struggle was dawning. The Labour Party, which did not even claim to be in favour of socialism when it was first formed, was to show itself to be totally incapable of defending the interests of the working class when war and revolution put it to the test.
When it comes to defending the interests of capitalism against the needs of the working class, when it comes to hypocritical apologies for imperialist war, there is nothing new about Blair and Brown’s New Labour. As a party of capital, Labour cannot be pressured or reformed into serving the interests of the working class. Faced with a deepening world economic crisis, Labour will continue to mount savage attacks on working class living standards; faced with the growing threat of imperialist wars, Labour will call on workers to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the national interest. If they are to defend themselves from all these dangers, workers will have to overcome all sentiment and all illusions: the Labour Party is their deadly enemy, and the day will come when they will have to dismantle it along with the rest of the capitalist state.
WR 1/10/5
In comparison to the economies of countries like France and Germany the British economy is supposed to be doing spectacularly well under the prudent direction of Gordon Brown. Inflation is ‘under control’, there’s ‘full employment’, low interest rates and, most recently, high levels of foreign investment, as well as the rest of the litany of claims that Labour always trots out.
The Brownian miracle is now coming swiftly to an end. This is not because of economic mismanagement (as the Tories claim) but as one national expression of an underlying international economic crisis that affects every part of the world economy. The basic reality of the declining British economy is coming back to the surface: rising inflation, rising unemployment and slowing growth. In fact, beyond the appearances so carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie, nothing has changed. And now even surface appearances are looking grim for capitalism.
For the last few years, one of the most important factors giving rise to the sense of ‘economic prosperity’ has been inflation in the housing market. Housing costs are not counted in every measure of inflation, so it has been possible for the rate of inflation in the cost of homes to be 20% a year or more, without that affecting the official rate of inflation. The reason that the bourgeoisie has encouraged this phenomenon is that it has created a sense of increasing wealth for homeowners, which in Britain is an exceptionally high, and still increasing, proportion of households.
This has provided the basis for a consumer driven stimulus to the economy. But, no real wealth is actually created by the process of inflation – the real value of homes has remained exactly the same. All that this process has given rise to is an increasing indebtedness on the part of consumers, alongside the appearance of wealth with rising property prices.
The Governor of the Bank of England maintains that only a fool would predict what is going to happen to house prices. This may be true, but we can at least predict that they will go up, stay the same or go down. All these possibilities are catastrophic. If the prices remain more or less constant then it implies stagnation in the market, as we have now. If the prices fall radically then many people – very many indeed – will be ruined because they have bought into the illusion that inflation in the housing market creates wealth. If the prices go up again then the situation we have now will simply be re-created in due course, but at a higher level of prices – and that would be more dangerous still. There is evidence that the housing market bubble is coming to an end.
“British net housing wealth has declined for the first time in a decade because of rising mortgage debt and falling house prices, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.
The net wealth tied up in British homes dropped by more than £60 billion in the second quarter. This was because falling house prices wiped close to £40 billion off the value of the housing stock and total mortgage debt rose by over £20 billion. The last time net housing wealth fell was in the fourth quarter of 1995.” (Financial Times, 20/8/5)
The impact on the economy as a whole is not lost on the bourgeoisie:
“Prof John Muellbauer of Nuffield College, Oxford, says a decline in housing wealth is already slowing the economy: ‘The decline in the growth rate of consumer expenditure is exactly what I would have expected and it has got further to run.’” (ibid)
The crisis over house prices is very serious in itself, but it is by no means the only cloud on the horizon for the bourgeoisie. In response to the slow down in consumer expenditure, the Bank of England put down the interest rate by 0.25 per cent in August, in order to stimulate the economy. It had been widely expected that it would do just that, and it would be just the first step in reducing the interest rate. But the inflation figures produced since then show inflation increasing to an extent that the Bank will be very constrained in making further reductions. Even if the increase in the official rate of inflation is not dramatic, the combination of increasing inflation and slowing growth is a very serious problem that the bourgeoisie has not had to face for over a decade.
The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England has the responsibility for setting interest rates. If they want to stimulate the economy they put the interest rate down, and if they want to choke off inflation they put it up (earlier in this year, for instance, they put it up to choke off further inflation in the housing market which they rightly regarded as extremely dangerous and de-stabilising). In September they left the interest rate as it was, because they could not decide whether the danger from inflation or the danger from declining growth was the more threatening.
The bourgeoisie like to blame the pension crisis (which exists in every country) on the problem of demographics: people live longer and the ratio of idle older people to productive young people is getting worse. There is no reason to deny that these problems do indeed accentuate the problem facing the bourgeoisie on the level of pensions. However, a recent report that deals with the question of demographics very seriously, underlines their importance and also shows that they are not the actual source of the problem. This report shows that the fact that people are living longer has not been factored in to the calculations of the deficits of company pension schemes, so that all the figures produced so far represent an underestimation of the problem.
“A British man born in 1950 will live, on average, to just two months short of his 90th birthday, with far reaching implications for pensions and the definition of old age, according to data released yesterday.
The figures from the Continuous Mortality Investigations Bureau should have a broad impact on company pension schemes that are already struggling with large funding deficits.
Most corporate pension schemes base their liability estimates on outdated projections for longevity.”
Since pensions have to be funded from future production the collapse of pension schemes simply reflects the bourgeoisie’s estimate of their own future. Since the future is bleak so is the outlook for pensions. This, no doubt combined with the issues of increasing longevity and demographics, is the reason for the collapse in annuity rates. An annuity is what is purchased at the point at which someone retires, if they are in a money purchase pension scheme. It is the amount you are paid until you die. It is what most people refer to as their ‘pension’ – the money they are supposed to live on. Although the precise figures can differ according to which article one is reading in the press, the basic situation is that £100,000 would buy an annuity of £9,000 a decade or so ago, and now will buy an annuity of £4,500.
The bourgeoisie cannot possibly do anything serious about this. This is a deep, structural expression of the crisis of capitalism that cannot be remedied by any means at all. Consequently they are putting forward meaningless ideological campaigns about having to ‘work until you drop’. In fact many older people would no doubt prefer the dignity of working to complete pauperisation. However, the main employers’ organisations have made it very clear that they will not employ older people. On the other hand they do support a rise in the state pension age – to start at 70. What people are supposed to do in between being kicked out of work and starting to receive their pension is not explained.
Economic difficulties experienced by the bourgeoisie in France and Germany has allowed the British bourgeoisie to claim that their economy is an example to all, and that it shows the value of their economic ‘reforms’. In reality the British economy is no better placed than those of Germany or France. The increasingly open manifestations of the crisis show that. These will be very important stimuli to reflection in the working class and, potentially, a spur to the development of workers’ struggles.
Hardin 30/9/05.
The dispute at Gate Gourmet has been brought to an end. The 670 catering staff were sacked in August for taking unofficial action when they heard of the scale of the attacks their employers were planning to implement. The dispute lead to a secondary walkout by British Airways baggage handlers and ground staff at Heathrow airport, which led to massive disruption for several days. According to the BBC, the deal struck between the employers and the T&GWU – and accepted by a mass meeting of the workers at the end of September - means that 300 of the sacked staff have accepted voluntary redundancy, with 144 compulsory redundancies being imposed – which means that only 226 of the workers have got their jobs back. We can safely assume that very few of the ‘troublemakers’ the employers initially refused to take back are amongst those being reinstated.
As we said in the last issue of WR, “…the attacks have nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with the economic situation. …[T]he reality is that every company is under intense and unsustainable pressure as the economic crisis of capitalism gets worse. They can only survive by doing each other down and, above all, by increasing the exploitation of the working class by cutting wages and worsening working conditions. In this situation making a deal with the bosses almost always means accepting something a little bit worse than the time before.” (‘Strikes at Heathrow: Class solidarity is our only defence’, WR 287)
As on many other occasions, the union has presented this deal as a ‘victory’, but since the job of the union is to make these deals they inevitably work hand in glove with the bosses. This can be seen clearly in the actions of the TGWU. Before the dispute broke out they were involved in discussions with Gate Gourmet, so they were well aware of its precarious financial position. When the workers at Heathrow took solidarity action the union leadership denounced them and pulled out all the stops to get those who had walked out back to work. With the Gate Gourmet workers then isolated, the union began to make militant noises, with fiery speeches at the TUC Congress calling for the legalisation of secondary picketing. While the Labour government have no intention of overturning the Tory ‘anti-union’ legislation, neither do the trade unions have the interests of the workers at heart, in fact completely the opposite. The unions are concerned about future struggles that pose the possibility of workers breaking out of the union prison. Such ‘legalised’ secondary action – “within the framework of the law and subject to balloting” – is akin to an ‘open prison’ where workers would still be under close supervision by the union’s goons.
Indeed, if the words and deeds of the T&G have benefited anyone then it is the employers. Their central complaint was that British Airways – Gate Gourmet’s principal customer - was driving such a hard bargain that it was throwing the company to the wall. As a result of the settlement deal Gate Gourmet have “…provisionally secured an improved BA contract…” (‘Gate Gourmet approves peace deal’, BBConline, 28/9/05).
The central tack taken by the leftists, principally the SWP, has been to divert attention away from the real reasons for the attacks – the economic crisis - by developing a campaign to defend ‘British unions’ against Gate Gourmet’s ‘union-busting’ American parent company. This has further developed into a campaign to defend 3 union officials at Heathrow who are under investigation by British Airways (with the support of the state) for allegedly organising the secondary unofficial action that caused such disruption. There have even been accusations that workers have been offered up to £350,000 for information implicating the leader of the T&G – Tony Woodley – in giving the go-ahead to the action at Heathrow, which would leave the union open to a £40million bill for compensation. (‘Heathrow: plot to break union’, SW, 1/10/05). While it is certainly true that the employers and the state are keen to nip any genuine signs of class solidarity in the bud, they certainly wouldn’t want to ‘break’ the union which provides very mechanisms for policing the working class. The leftists are clearly carrying out their loyal duty as the left wing of capitalism by calling on the workers to rally round the union officials, to come to the defence of their gaolers.
The dispute at Gate Gourmet and the show of solidarity by the workers at Heathrow provided a boost of confidence not only to workers in Britain, but at the international level. Again, as we said WR 287, “The bosses, the unions and the state have come together to defeat the workers. They want the working class to learn the lesson that class struggle, initiated and controlled by the working class, is futile and that only the unions can defend them. The working class, on the contrary, must draw an entirely different lesson. That lesson is simply: Know your enemy.” By bringing the dispute to a relatively quick end, by not dragging it out, the bourgeoisie has shown its own intelligence. It is keenly aware of the growing unrest within the proletariat and its ability to draw its own conclusions, of the threat posed by its mortal enemy.
Spencer 1/10/05.
At first the 7th July bombings in London were attributed to the anonymous, unknown forces of al-Qaida. There was shock when it was revealed that the bombers were brought up in Britain. People wondered how someone could let off a bomb that would inevitably kill people who had been through the same education system, used the same health service, seen the same TV programmes or even been of the same religious faith.
The video of Mohammad Sidique Khan gave an explanation for the massacres on public transport. “Your democratically elected governments perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you responsible just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our target. Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we’ll not stop this fight.” We’ve heard these sorts of threats many times before. They’re typical of the justifications given by all imperialist war-mongers. It is usual military practice to talk about how you’re providing protection or security, as you prepare the weapons that are going to be used indiscriminately against other victims of imperialist conflict.
It was also predictably hypocritical for Tony Blair to denounce an “evil ideology” and an “extremist minority” when the approach of the London bombers has so much in common with what’s put forward by the occupiers of Downing Street or the White House.
Khan reduces the world to two parts. There are the governments who have intervened in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as all the people who live in the countries run by these governments, without distinction. Against this there is the ‘world of Islam’, presumably including everyone who professes faith in Allah, without any differentiation.
Blair has a similar approach. There is the ‘civilised world’ and there are those who support or incite ‘terrorism’ against it. You can see from the imperialist policy pursued by the Labour government since 1997 that they too make little distinction or differentiation when using military means to defend the interests of British capitalism. The bombings of Belgrade, Kabul and Baghdad were every bit as brutal and indiscriminate as car bombings in Iraq or suicide bombings on London transport. Whether it’s the ‘defence of civilisation’ or the ‘defence of Islam’ or ‘opposition to the occupation of Iraq’, these are just the banners under which bourgeois policies, capitalist interests are advanced.
What the ideologies - whether Islamic, New Labour, Republican or whatever - do is attempt to mystify us as to what’s really happening in the world. Take the example of the idea of ‘democratically elected governments’ being somehow responsive to the needs of ordinary people, in contrast to absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia or military dictatorships such as Burma/Myanmar. In reality the capitalist state defends the interests of the ruling capitalist class, regardless of the details of the political system in each country.
In Khan’s statement the attempt to imply that everyone in the West should be identified with their governments or that all Muslims have something in common might seem crude, but to turn to the spin-doctored sophistication of the advanced liberal democracies is not to find much difference.
Bush is derided as a buffoon wrapped in the US flag, but all of American mainstream politics is soaked in nationalist rhetoric. On top of that there’s the idea of two Americas, the red Republican states and the blue Democrat states. And then there’s the idea of the specific ‘ethnic’ communities that you’re supposed to identify with - African-American, Hispanic, Jewish etc.
In Britain years ago Norman Tebbitt was ridiculed for his insistence on everyone rooting for the English team in sporting events. But now it’s automatically assumed that everyone has a national side to support. It doesn’t matter if you support Jamaica, Ireland or India; you’re still locked into the nationalist framework. Also the addition of questions on ethnicity, religion and culture to the census is just one small sign that the US example is being taken up. The debates over ‘multiculturalism’ and segregation, or on assimilation against integration, all assume that there’s such a thing as a Muslim community, an Irish community, or even a ‘host community’. There is also the assumption that Northern Ireland is divided into a Catholic and Protestant community, or that all Londoners can be lumped together. All these bourgeois assumptions, whether emphasising ‘British values’ or the diversity of many ‘cultures’, only serve to reinforce the rule of the bourgeoisie.
For the working class, whether we’re united behind explicit British nationalism or divided into an array of communities, we will be defeated if we don’t start from an understanding of class interests. The working class, the class that has only its labour power to sell, is exploited by a capitalist class that has a parasitic existence leaching on the value workers create. Not only do we have to develop a sense of ourselves as a class, to understand the means and goals of our historic struggle; we also have to see clearly what the bourgeoisie is and the lies it tells to sustain its rule. Mohammad Khan said he was a soldier. Like so many other soldiers, he died having swallowed the lies of the ruling class.
Car 30/9/05.
When it comes to lies and hypocrisy, the British media was in top form in its description of the riots provoked by the British army in Basra last month. The freeing of two undercover British agents at the barrel of a tank from an Iraqi police station was described as robust and even heroic, while the Iraqis throwing petrol bombs at the tank were denounced as a baying, bloodthirsty mob. What has gone less reported is the reason for the anger of the crowd: not just the arrogant show of force by British troops against their supposed allies in the Iraqi state apparatus, but the widespread reports that the undercover agents were not only dressed as Mehdi army militia men (the armed supporters of Shia radical Moqtada al Sadr), not only fired on Iraqi police when questioned, but were carrying a stash of weapons, including an anti-tank gun and, most curiously, explosives and a detonator. This accusation has been made official by Iraqi government spokesmen. The implication is that the agents were on their way to carrying out a terrorist atrocity.
In the atmosphere of fear and terror that reigns in Iraq, it is routine for the population to blame the occupying forces for massacres which are officially attributed to groups like al Qaida. The western press usually dismisses such claims as typical of Arab paranoia. In our minds there is no doubt that al Qaida and similar groups are indeed responsible for many bloody crimes against the civil population. But we are also keenly aware that the occupying forces are perfectly capable of carrying out such attacks themselves. The British state, which supposedly adheres to the rule of law and abhors the ‘men of violence’ in Ireland, has so deeply infiltrated the IRA and Protestant terror gangs that its agents have been directly involved in torture, assassination, and terrorist bombings. In the case of the Protestant gangs, the infiltration is so thorough that groups like the UDA are more or less a covert wing of the British army; but even in the ‘enemy’ IRA you had the absurd situation where one British agent (‘Stakeknife’) became the head of the IRA commission investigating…British agents in the IRA, and was therefore regularly involved in the torture and killing of fellow British agents.
The insistence of Iraqi forces, from the local police to the Moqtada organisation to the central government, that these agents were involved in something very shady indeed was if anything confirmed by the haste and violence of the operation freeing them. It seems clear that the British army has something to hide.
The question is then posed: what would the British army gain by planting bombs and further wracking up the mounting tensions that separate Shia from Sunni, Arab from Kurd, and even Shia faction from Shia faction? Up till now, the British have tended to favour the Moqtada al Sadr organisation over some of the more mainstream Iraqi Shia groups such as the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, which is seen as a stooge of Iran. So why would the British want to discredit the Mehdi army by carrying out atrocities in their garb? The situation is too murky to provide clear answers. But both in America and Britain certain elements of the bourgeoisie are already assuming that Iraq is doomed to break up into three separate states – Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the centre, and Shia in the south(1). It could be that such elements are already thinking that the more Iraq descends into chaos, the better, because it will bring it closer to this final dismemberment.
Or it could be that, like the terrorist gangs caught up in an irrational spiral of hatred and revenge, the armed forces are simply being dragged into the destructive logic that is currently devastating Iraq. The net result is the same: bloodshed and chaos on an ever-mounting scale. The ‘liberating heroes’ of the great democracies are once again shown to be the mirror image of the terrorists they claim to be opposing.
Amos 30/9/5
(1) For example, former high-ranking State Department and Pentagon official Leslie Gelb published an article in the New York Times on 25 November 2003 advocating ‘The Three State Solution’ in Iraq. A ‘British’ argument in favour of a Shia state, on the other hand, would be that it could serve as a counter-weight to the USA and would preserve a stronger British influence than in the rest of the country.
WR, 1/10/03.
It’s now more than two years since the US army took control of Baghdad, and George Bush came out with the cynical victory cry: “mission accomplished”. A bright future was promised: the world would be a safer place and Iraq would become a stable democracy. Reality is elsewhere. Iraq is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos and barbarism.
The US military intervention opened a real Pandora’s box. The situation has got worse and worse, becoming more and more uncontrollable and explosive. There is a now a pitiless war between Sunnis and Shias, a murderous spiral of hatred and terror. Armed repression, suicide attacks, pogroms, summary executions follow each other day after day.
On Saturday 10 September, the US army and the Iraqi security forces carried out a major offensive against the rebel bastion of Tel Afar in the north of Iraq, close to the Syrian frontier. The official death toll was 160. But far from controlling the Sunni uprising, this attack by the US and Iraqi governments only fanned the flames. The Iraqi branch of Al-Qaida immediately called for revenge, and there has been a new wave of terrorist attacks since then. On Wednesday 14 September alone there were 11 attacks and nearly 150 killed. The most bloody of these was carried out in a Baghdad square where workers were gathering in the hope of finding work for the day in the building trade. 140 were killed. More recently, on 26 September, five Shia teachers and a school bus driver in a mainly Sunni village south of Baghdad were taken away from their pupils and shot dead. Up till now, attacks on schools have been extremely rare.
The warlords of Iraq have imposed a true reign of terror! The working class and the poorest layers of the population are clearly the first victims of all these atrocities. A few hours after the massacre of the Shia building workers, there was a revenge operation in which armed men opened fire on Sunnis gathered at a market. Two days after the attack on the marketplace, a queue of Shia workers waiting for payment were raked by machine gun fire. The day after that, a bomb went off at the market in Nahrawan, killing another 30 people. The list goes on and on. This reign of blind revenge is a symbol of society in full decomposition.
The frightful panic which led to the death of a thousand people on 31 August during a Shia procession in Baghdad shows the degree to which the population lives in a state of terror. A million and a half people were converging on the Kadhimiya mosque; unable to assure their safety, the American and Iraqi military forces closed all the bridges over the Tigris, except one, in order to concentrate the population on one single route. The pilgrims were thus already being packed together when a rumour spread about suicide bombers being in the crowd. A true collective hysteria ensued. Hundreds of people were crushed or drowned in the stampede.
On 15 October, Iraqi electors will be called upon to vote “for or against” the new constitution. This referendum is supposed to be a demonstration of national unity. Those responsible for the new text have hidden behind a few superficial declarations, while George Bush has spoken of the dawn of a “period of hope”.
But reality is giving the lie to this phoney optimism. The new constitution will not only not put an end to the prevailing chaos; it will exacerbate rivalries more than ever. Iraqi president Talabani has himself recognised that “Iraq is not on the edge of civil war, it’s already in the middle of it”.
The text is essentially the result of a compromise between Shias and Kurds who dominate the Assembly and the government. Thus the Sunni bourgeoisie can only violent reject the proposed constitution, which symbolises its loss of power.
And the Shias themselves are divided over the adoption of this text. These differences have led to actual armed clashes between different Shia cliques. On Wednesday 25 August, there were violent confrontations between fighters loyal to the radical Imam Moqtada Al-Sadr and the rival Shia militia, the Badr brigade, in Najaf. Al-Sadr is taking advantage of the debate over the constitution to make a comeback and try to redistribute the cards in his favour.
Thus the real alternative put forward by the referendum on 15 October is this: more chaos, or more chaos? If the new constitution is adopted, the Sunni warlords and part of the Shia warlords will unleash even more blood and fire as they feel power slipping away from them. If the No wins it, which is most likely, the Kurds and the Shias in power will probably be tempted to proclaim their autonomy, leading to the break up of the Iraqi state.
This uncontrollable war which is bit by bit dismembering Iraq is about to radiate across the whole surrounding region.
First of all Turkey is getting very nervous about the autonomist ambitions of the Iraqi Kurds. It knows very well that this situation, pregnant with instability for the whole of Kurdistan, could put the unity of its own state in danger. This is why throughout the summer there have been real tensions within the Turkish bourgeoisie, between those who stand for the ‘soft’ method, for more ‘democracy’, and those who stand for the ‘hard’ method, calling for new laws to deal with ‘terrorism’.
At the same time the chaotic situation in Iraq reveals the growing impotence of the USA. Despite repeated demonstrations of military power, the world’s leading power is incapable of making up for the historic weakening of its leadership. The catastrophic situation of the American army in the region is thus sharpening the imperialist appetites of all the neighbouring countries. Syria, with its frontier on the Sunni region, is secretly fuelling the rebellion with men and arms. And Iran is more and more openly interfering in Iraqi affairs.
Faced with this loss of control, the USA can only respond with increasing brutality. We have seen a growing number of bellicose declarations against Syria, which is accused of fomenting terrorism, and against Iran, above all over the issue of its nuclear programme. In the same way the display of force by the US army against the rebel stronghold of Tel Afar has opened the door to new rounds of massive destruction.
The whole of the Middle East is threatened by war and chaos. A picture of this region would not be complete without a brief description of the terrible situation in the Gaza strip. Following the withdrawal of the Jewish settlers, the Israeli state is in the process of building a new ‘hi-tech’ wall on its side, while Egypt has closed its border with a line of barbed wire and machine gun posts. Between these walls, in this ghetto, the population goes hungry and suffers from the double yoke of the Palestinian police and the Islamist militias. And despite the fact that one of them, Hamas, declared on 26 September that it would keep to the ceasefire with Israel, within a few hours of this statement Israeli jets had launched attacks on militia sites in Gaza. New revenge attacks and suicide bombings are guaranteed to follow.
The perspective is not peace but growing barbarism. At stake now is the very unity of Iraq. Kurdistan, the Sunni and Shia regions are heading towards a break-up of the country, and for all its military power the USA cannot stop this process. And the effects of this will be felt throughout the Middle East.
Capitalism is a moribund system that is soaking the planet in mud and blood. The proletariat must put an end to it before it plunges the whole of humanity into out-and-out barbarism.
Pawel
The regroupment of revolutionaries, the unification of the proletariat’s political forces around the positions of the communist left must, in order to be successful, proceed at every stage according to the needs of the long term interests of the proletariat as a whole, rather than the particular or competitive interests of one group against another to the detriment of the whole movement and its future. The history of the Communist Workers Organisation and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (of which the CWO is the ‘British Affiliate’) is the negative proof of this fact. The opportunist regroupment policy of the IBRP has reached a new low with the recent support given by the IBRP to the parasitic group the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ and its anti-communist behaviour against the ICC (slanders, theft, etc)1. This was illustrated in the support of both these organisations for the slanders of the completely bogus Argentine group ‘Circulo des Comunistas Internacionalistas’ against the ICC in October 2004.2 This opportunist adventure with the Circulo ended in another fiasco for the IBRP. The lessons must be drawn by all revolutionaries today. As a contribution to this effort the following article will try to show how this opportunist regroupment policy has followed a pattern over the past thirty years. It has particular interest for revolutionaries in Britain.
Following an appeal launched in November 1972 by the American group Internationalism a series of meetings was organised between several groups which reclaimed the tradition of the communist left. The most regular participants of these meetings were Revolution Internationale from France and three groups based in Britain, World Revolution, Revolutionary Perspectives and Workers’ Voice. WR and RP came from splits in Solidarity which was based on anarcho-councilist positions. WV was a small group of workers from Liverpool who had broken with Trotskyism a short while before. Following these discussions the three British groups came to positions close to those of Revolution Internationale and Internationalism (around which the ICC was constituted the following year). However, the process of unification of these three groups ended in failure. On the one hand the elements of Workers’ Voice decided to break with World Revolution. The latter had retained semi-councilist positions on the 1917 revolution in Russia: it considered that it was a proletarian revolution but that the Bolshevik Party was bourgeois, a position of which it had convinced the comrades of WV. And when WR, at the time of the meeting in January 1974, rejected these last remnants of councilism and rallied to the position of Revolution Internationale these comrades felt ‘betrayed’ and developed a great hostility to those in WR (whom it accused of ‘capitulating to RI’). This led them to publish a ‘Statement’ in November 1974 defining the groups who were going to form the ICC shortly after as “counter-revolutionaries”3. For its part, RP demanded to be integrated into the ICC as a ‘tendency’ with its own platform (to the extent that there were still differences between it and the ICC). We responded that our approach was not to integrate ‘tendencies’ as such, each with its own platform, even if we consider that there can be differences on secondary aspects of the programmatic documents within the organisation. We did not shut the door on discussion with RP but this group began to distance itself from the ICC. An attempted ‘alternative’ international regroupment to the ICC, with WV, the French group ‘Pour une Intervention Communiste’ (PIC) and the ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Group’ (RWG) of Chicago was short-lived. The only question which brought these four groups together was their growing hostility to the ICC. Finally, however, there was the regroupment between RP and WV in Britain (September 1975) to constitute the ‘Communist Workers’ Organisation” (CWO). RP had to pay a price for this unification: its militants had to accept the position of WV that the ICC was ‘counter-revolutionary’. It was a position they maintained for some time, even after the departure from the CWO, one year later, of the old members of WV who particularly reproached those of RP for their … intolerance of other groups!4
It was only much later, when the CWO had started to discuss with the Partito Comunista Internazionalista of Italy (Battaglia Comunista) that it renounced the view that the ICC is ‘counter-revolutionary’ (if it had maintained its previous criteria it would also have had to consider BC an organisation of the bourgeoisie!).
So, the birth of the CWO was marked by the fact that the ICC did not accept the demand for RP to be integrated into our organisation with its own platform. These ‘birth marks’ finally led to the formation of the IBRP in 1984: the CWO could at last participate in an international regroupment after its previous failures.
The process which led to the formation of the IBRP was marked by the sort of approach where those ‘disenchanted with the ICC’ turned towards the IBRP. We will not go into the three conferences of the groups of the communist left which were held between 1977 and 1980 following an appeal from BC in April 1976: readers can refer to a new article on the conferences in International Review 122. In particular our press has often stressed that BC and the CWO deliberately scuttled this effort in a totally irresponsible way, solely for petty sectarian reasons, by hastily calling for a vote at the end of the 3rd conference on the question of the role and function of the party as a supplementary criterion. This was specifically aimed at the exclusion of the ICC from future conferences. The 1982 ‘conference’ brought together, apart from BC and the CWO, the “Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants” (SUCM) a group of Iranian students mainly based in Britain. The ICC had concluded that this was a leftist group coming from Maoism, despite their declarations of agreement with the communist left. The SUCM then turned to the CWO which did not take account of the warnings against this group from our comrades in the section in Britain. In fact, all the other ‘forces’ that the CWO-BC tandem had ‘selected’ for invitation (according to the term used by BC) deserted: whether because they could not come, as was the case for ‘Kommunistische Politik’ from Austria or L’Eveil Internationalist, or because they had disappeared by the time of the ‘Conference’ as was the case for two American groups, ‘Marxist Worker’ and ‘Wildcat’. Bizarrely, the latter, despite its councilism, was considered as an entrant according to the ‘criteria’ decreed by BC and the CWO.
The flirtation with the SUCM was not pursued for long, not due to the lucidity of the comrades of BC and the CWO but simply because this leftist group, which could not hide its real nature for ever, ended up integrating itself into the Communist Party of Iran, a radical Stalinist organisation formed from a fusion between the Iranian UCM and the Kurdish ‘peshmergas’ of Komala.
As for the conferences of the communist left, BC and the CWO did not call any others, preferring to avoid the ridicule of a new fiasco.
Our press has carried several articles about the Communist Bulletin Group5. This tiny parasitic group was made up of former members of the ICC who left in 1981 with the theft of material and money from our organisation; its sole reason for existence was to throw mud at our organisation. At the end of 1983 this group had responded favourably to an ‘Address to proletarian political groups’ adopted by the 5th ICC Congress. However, it made not the slightest critique of its thuggish behaviour. We thus wrote in reply “Until the fundamental question of the defence of the political organisations of the proletariat is understood, we are obliged to consider the CBG’s letter as null and void. They got the wrong Address.”
Probably disappointed that the ICC had repulsed their advances, and visibly suffering from isolation, the CBG turned towards the CWO. A meeting was held in Edinburgh in December 1992 following a “practical collaboration between members of the CWO and the CBG”. “A large number of misunderstandings have been clarified on both sides. It has therefore been decided to make the practical co-operation more formal. An agreement has been written that the CWO as a whole should ratify in January (after which a complete report will be published) and which includes the following points…” There follows a list of different agreements for collaboration and especially: “The two groups will discuss a proposed ‘popular platform’ prepared by a comrade of the CWO as a tool for intervention” (Workers’ Voice 64, January-February 1996).
Apparently this flirtation was not continued for we have never heard any more on the collaboration of the CBG and the CWO. Nor have we ever read anything explaining why this collaboration came to nothing.
In the 1980s, the IBRP began to argue that conditions in the countries of the periphery “make mass communist organisations possible” (Communist Review 3), which obviously supposes that it is more easy to create them there than in the central countries of capitalism. The abortive flirtation of the IBRP with the SUCM was therefore particularly disappointing. The IBRP’s discussions with the Lal Pataka group in India provided no relief. This was a group of Indian nationalist extraction which, like the SUCM, had not really broken from its origins despite the sympathies that it expressed for the positions of the communist left. The IBRP rejected the warnings of the ICC against this group (which ultimately was reduced to just one element). For some time Lal Pataka was presented as the constituent part of the IBRP in India, but, in 1991, this name disappeared from the pages of the press of the IBRP, to be replaced by that of the group Kamunist Kranti formed by an element who had previously been in discussion with the ICC. The IBRP announced: “We hope that in the future productive relations will be established between the International Bureau and Kamunist Kranti” . But these hopes were soon dashed because, two years later, you could read in Communist Review 11: “It is a tragedy that, despite the existence of promising elements, there doesn’t yet exist a solid nucleus of Indian communists”. Effectively Kamunist Kranti disappeared from circulation. There still exists a small communist nucleus in India, that publishes Communist Internationalist, but it is part of the ICC and the IBRP “forgets” to make any reference to it.
This group was made up of elements who had taken classes in Maoism (of the pro-Albanian variety). We had discussions with these elements for a long period but we noted their inability to overcome their leftist confusions. Also, when in the mid-1990s this small group got close to the IBRP we warned them against the confusions of the LAWV. The IBRP took this warning very badly, thinking that we didn’t want it to develop a political presence in North America. For several years the LAWV was a sympathising group of the IBRP in the United States, and in April 2000 it participated in Montreal, Canada, in a conference intended to strengthen the political presence of the IBRP in North America. However, a short time after, the Los Angeles elements began to express their disagreements on a whole series of questions, adopting a more and more anarchist vision (rejection of centralisation, depiction of the Bolsheviks as a bourgeois party, etc). But above all it began pouring out sordid slanders against the IBRP and particularly against another American sympathiser of this organisation, AS, who lived in another state. Our press in the US denounced the behaviour of the LAWV elements and expressed its solidarity with the slandered militants.6 It’s for this reason that we thought it useful at that time to recall the warnings that we had made to the IBRP at the beginning of its idyll with the LAWV.
One can only be fascinated by the repetition of the phenomenon where elements who are “disenchanted with the ICC” later turn towards the IBRP. Perhaps after having understood that the positions of the ICC are erroneous, these elements turn to the correctness and clarity of the IBRP? The problem is that all the groups mentioned here have disappeared or, like the SUCM, returned to the ranks of bourgeois organisations. The IBRP must ask itself why, and it would be interesting if it could produce a balance sheet of its experiences for the working class.
Quite obviously, what animates the approach of these groups is not the search for clarity that they’ve not found in the ICC, seeing that they ended up abandoning communist militancy. The facts have amply demonstrated that their distancing from the ICC corresponds fundamentally to a distancing from the programmatic clarity and the method of the communist left, most often ending in a rejection of the demands of militancy within this current. In reality their ephemeral flirtation with the IBRP is only one step before their abandonment of combat in the ranks of the proletariat. The question is posed then: why has the IBRP been drawn into such a trajectory? To this question there is a fundamental answer: the IBRP defends an opportunist method on the regroupment of revolutionaries.
It is this opportunism of the IBRP that allows elements that refuse to make a complete break with their leftist past to find a temporary “refuge”, allowing them to think, or to say, that they are still engaged in the communist left. The IBRP, particularly since the 3rd Conference of the Groups of the Communist Left, has not stopped insisting on the necessity for a “rigorous selection” in the proletarian milieu. But, in reality, this selection is one way: it says that the ICC is no longer “ a valid force in the perspective for the future world party of the proletariat” and that it “can’t be considered by us [the IBRP] as a valid partner in defining any kind of unity of action” (response to our appeal of the 11 February 2003 addressed to groups of the communist left for a common intervention on the war in Iraq and published in International Review 113). Consequently it is out of the question for the IBRP to establish the least cooperation with the ICC, even for a common declaration of the internationalist camp in the face of imperialist war. However, this great rigour is not exercised in other directions, and notably towards groups that have nothing to do with the communist left, when they are not leftist groups pure and simple.
The counterpart of this opportunism of the IBRP is the indulgence that it shows towards elements hostile to our organisation. As we have seen at the beginning of this article, one of the bases for the constitution of the CWO in Britain was not only the desire to maintain its own “individuality” (RP’s demand to be integrated into the ICC as a “tendency” with its own platform) but as a means of opposing the ICC (considered at one time as “counter-revolutionary”). More precisely, the attitude of the Workers Voice elements in the CWO - consisting, as we have seen above, in “using RP as a shield against the ICC” - is found with a lot of other elements and groups where the principle motivation is hostility towards the ICC. This was the case with the parasitic CBG, with whom the CWO engaged in a short-lived flirtation: the level of their sordid denigrations of the ICC has not been rivalled until recently with the IFICC and the ‘Circulo’.
Adapted from International Review 121 [7]
1 See the article on our website in response to the IBRP: ‘Theft and slander are not methods of the working class’.
2 See our website for the different ICC texts on the ‘Circulo’: ‘A strange apparition’; ‘A new strange apparition’; ‘Imposture or reality’ and also in our territorial press: ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’ (Argentina): An impostor unmasked’. The Circulo claimed that it was the successor to the group Nucleo Comunista Internacionalista, which had been developing fraternal relations with the ICC. In fact, the NCI’s alleged ‘break’ with the ICC was a fabrication concocted by a single member of the NCI, behind the backs of the rest of the group. This was clearly demonstrated when the NCI published a declaration on 27 October 2004 denouncing the actions of the ‘Circulo’ (see our website). The ICC strongly criticised the IBRP for publishing the slanders of the Circulo without verifying them or even establishing whether the Circulo really existed. We asked the IBRP to publish a disclaimer by the ICC on its website, which it did, and also the declaration of the NCI, which it did not. At a recent ICC forum in London, a comrade of the CWO acknowledged that it had been a mistake to publish unverified attacks by the Circulo on the ICC. We can only encourage the IBRP to take further steps in this direction – for example, by accepting that it was also a mistake not to have published the NCI’s statement and for Battaglia’s website to maintain, to this day, a link with the website of the non-existent Circulo.
3 See Workers’ Voice 13, to which we responded in International Review 2 as well as our article ‘Sectarianism unlimited’ in World Revolution 3.
4 When the CWO was constituted we called it an “incomplete regroupment” (see World Revolution 5). The facts very rapidly confirmed this analysis: in the minutes of a meeting of the CWO to examine the departure of the elements from Liverpool, it is written “It was felt that the old WV had never accepted the politics of the fusion, rather they had used RP as a shield against the ICC” (quoted in ‘The CWO; past, present and future’, text of the elements who left the CWO in November 1977 to join the ICC, published in International Review 12).
5 See particularly ‘In answer to the replies’, International Review 36.
6 See our article ‘Defence of the revolutionary milieu’ in Internationalism 122 (summer 2002).
Since the end of the 1980s, terrorism has regularly been at the forefront of the international situation; and for the bourgeoisie of the big powers it has become ‘Public Enemy No.1’. In the name of the fight against the barbarity of terrorism, the two main powers which were at the head of the Western and Eastern blocs, the United States and Russia, have unleashed war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya.
During the 1980’s, the multiplication of terrorist attacks (such as those of 1986 in Paris) executed by fanatical grouplets commanded by Iran, brought forward a new phenomenon in history. No longer, as at the beginning of the 20th century, were terrorist actions limited to those led by minority groups, aiming for the constitution or the national independence of a state. Now it was states themselves which took control and used terrorism as an arm of war against other states.
The fact that terrorism has become an instrument of the state for carrying out war marked a qualitative change in the evolution of imperialism.
In the recent period, we can see that it is major powers, in particular the United States and Russia, which have used terrorism as a means of manipulation in order to justify their military interventions. Thus, the media itself has revealed that the bombings in Moscow of summer 1999 were perpetrated with explosives made by the military, and that Putin, the boss of the FSB (ex-KGB) at the time, was probably in command of them. These attacks were a pretext to justify the invasion of Chechnya by Russian troops.
Similarly, as we have fully analysed in our press, the September 11 attack against the Twin Towers in New York served as a pretext for the American bourgeoisie to launch its bombs on Afghanistan in the name of the fight against terrorism and against ‘rogue states’.
Even if the American state didn’t directly organise this attack, it is inconceivable to imagine that the secret services of the leading world power were taken by surprise, just like any banana republic. It is more than likely that the American state let it happen, sacrificing its Twin Towers and close to 3000 human lives.
This was the price that American imperialism was ready to pay in order to be able to reaffirm its world leadership by unleashing the “Unlimited Justice” operation in Afghanistan. What’s more, this deliberate policy of the American bourgeoisie is not new. It was already used in December 1941 at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor [1] to justify the USA’s entry into the Second World War; and, more recently, at the time of the invasion of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein in August 1990 in order to unleash the Gulf War under the aegis of Uncle Sam.
But this policy of “non-interference” no longer consists, as in 1941 or in 1990, of letting the enemy attack first according to the classic laws of war between states.
It is no longer war between rival states, with its own rules, its flags, its preparations, its troops, its battlefields and armaments, which serves as the pretext for the massive intervention of the big powers.
Now it is blind terrorist attacks, with their fanatic, kamikaze commandos directly striking the civil population, which are then utilised by the big powers in order to justify letting loose imperialist barbarity.
Today, terrorism is inseparable from imperialism. The form that imperialist war is taking now is the result of the world disorder which capitalism entered with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the dislocation of the western bloc. This event, as we have shown, spectacularly marked the entry of capitalism into the ultimate phase of its decadence, that of decomposition.
Since we developed this analysis in the middle of the 1980’s, [2] this phenomenon has only widened and intensified. It is characterised by the development of terrorism on a scale unprecedented in history.
The use and manipulation of terrorism is no longer restricted to lesser states like Libya or Iran. The fact that this “poor man’s atomic bomb” is now utilised by the big powers in defence of their imperialist interests on the world chessboard is a particularly significant expression of the decomposition of society.
Up to now the ruling class has succeeded in pushing obvious manifestations of the decadence of its system onto the peripheries of capitalism. Thus the most brutal manifestations of the economic crisis of capitalism had first of all affected the countries of the periphery. In the same way that this insoluble crisis has now begun to come back home with force, hitting with full strength the very heart of capitalism, the most barbaric forms of imperialist war now make their appearance in the great metropoles such as New York, Madrid, London and Moscow.
Moreover, this new expression of imperialist war reveals the suicidal dynamic of a bourgeois society in full putrefaction. In fact, the use of terrorism as an arm of war is accompanied by the acceptance of sacrifices. Thus it is not only the kamikazes who sacrifice lives in the image of a world which is killing itself, but equally the ruling class of the states struck by terrorist attacks, such as the American bourgeoisie. Doesn’t the broadcasting on all the screens of the world of the images of the Twin Towers collapsing like a house of cards convey to us the vision of a world heading towards the apocalypse? By allowing the September 11 attacks to happen, the first world power deliberately decided to sacrifice the Twin Towers, a symbol of its economic supremacy. It deliberately sacrificed close to 3000 American citizens on its own national soil. In this sense, the dead of New York have not only been massacred by the barbarity of Al Qaida; the deed was also done with the cold and cynical complicity of the American state itself.
The use of terrorism as an arm of imperialist war in the present historic period of the decomposition of capitalism reveals that all states are “renegade states” led by imperialist gangsters. The sole difference which distinguishes the big gang leaders, such as the American Godfather, and the second-rate gangsters who set off the bombs, lies in the means of destruction they have at their disposal.
By sweeping away the classical rules of war, by becoming the common instrument of all nations big and small, terrorism has become one of the most striking expressions of a system that is rotting on its feet. In New York, London, Madrid, Moscow, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, Bali, it is the civil populations that are today terrorised by the murderous madness of capitalism.
Generally speaking, classical terrorism could be defined as the violent action of small minorities in revolt against the overwhelming domination of the existing social order and its state. It is not a new phenomenon in history. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, the Russian Populists made terrorism their main instrument in the combat against Tsarism. A little later, in countries like France and Spain for example, it was taken up by certain sectors of anarchism. Throughout the 20th century, terrorism continued to develop and frequently accompanied movements for national independence, as we saw with the IRA, ETA from the Basque country, the FLN during the war in Algeria, the Palestinian PLO, etc. It was also used by the Allied camp during the Second World War by the nationalist Resistance groups fighting Nazi occupation, now loudly praised by Stalinists, Trotskyists and anarchists. In the aftermath of the war, it was used by certain sectors of the Zionist movement who were seeking to set up the state of Israel (Menachem Begin, one of the most celebrated Prime Ministers of Israel - and a signatory to the Camp David accords of 1979 - had, in his youth, been one of the founders of the Irgun, a Jewish terrorist group which shot to fame through its attacks against the British).
Thus terrorism has not only been able to present itself (above all at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries) as a means for the struggle of the oppressed against the domination of the state; it has also been (principally in the 20th century) a favourite instrument of nationalist movements aiming to set up new states. This said, is it still possible to resort to acts of terrorism in order to carry out the struggle against the bourgeois state? The question is worth posing since, as well as certain anarchist movements which say they are fighting for the emancipation of the working class, some groups laying claim to the communist revolution have taken up terrorism, claiming that it can be an arm of combat of the working class; and as a result they have sometimes drawn groups of sincere workers behind them. This was notably the case during the 1970’s in Italy and Germany.
In reality this terrain of violent struggle by armed minorities is not that of the working class. It is the terrain of the desperate petty-bourgeoisie, that’s to say a class without a historic future which can never raise itself to mass actions. Such actions are the emanation of individual will and not of the generalised action of a revolutionary class. As a practice terrorism reflects its content perfectly: when it is not an instrument of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie itself, it is the emanation of layers of the petty bourgeoisie. It is the sterile practice of impotent social layers without a future.
The ruling class has always used terrorism as an instrument of manipulation, as much against the working class as in its own settling of internal accounts.
From the fact that terrorism is an action which is prepared in the shadows of a tight conspiracy, it thus offers “a favourite hunting ground for the underhand activities of agents of the police and the state and for all sorts of manipulations and intrigues” (‘Resolution on terror, terrorism and class violence’, International Review 15). Already last century, the terrorist actions of the anarchists were used by the bourgeoisie to strengthen its state terror against the working class. There is the example of the “Villainy law” voted by the French bourgeoisie following the terrorist attack by the anarchist Auguste Vaillant who, on December 9 1893, threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, wounding forty people. This attack had been manipulated by the state itself and served as a pretext for the ruling class to immediately vote for exceptional measures against the socialists, repressing the freedom of association and of the press.
Similarly, in the 1970’s, the massive anti-terrorist campaigns orchestrated by the bourgeoisie following the Schleyer affair in Germany and the Aldo Moro affair in Italy served as a pretext for the state to strengthen its apparatus for the control and repression of the working class.
It was subsequently demonstrated that the Baader Gang and the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by, respectively, the secret services of East Germany, the Stasi, and the secret services of the Italian state. These terrorist grouplets were in reality nothing other than the instruments of rivalry between bourgeois cliques.
The kidnapping of Aldo Moro in a raid of military efficiency and his assassination on May 9 1978 (after the Italian government had refused to negotiate his freedom) wasn’t the work of some terrorist fanatics. Behind the action of the Red Brigades, there were political stakes implicating not only the Italian state itself, but also the big powers. In fact, Aldo Moro represented a faction of the Italian bourgeoisie favourable to the entry of the Communist Party into the governmental majority, an option to which the United States was firmly opposed. The Red Brigades shared this opposition to the policy of the “historic compromise” between Christian Democrats and the CP defended by Aldo Moro and thus openly played the game of the American state. Moreover, the fact that the Red Brigades had been directly infiltrated by the Gladio network (a creation of NATO whose mission was to set up networks of resistance should the USSR invade Western Europe) revealed that from the end of the 1970’s, terrorism had begun to become an instrument of manipulation in imperialist conflicts.
Today terrorism is being revealed more and more as an expression of capitalism’s slide into barbarism and war.
This situation constitutes an appeal to the responsibility of the world proletariat. The latter is the sole force in society capable, through its revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, to put an end to war, massacres, and to capitalist terror in all its forms. Louise
Based on an article which
first appeared in English in World Revolution 262
[1] See International Review 108, ‘Pearl Harbor 1941, the Twin Towers 2001: the Machiavellianism of the Bourgeoisie’.
[2] See International Review 107 ‘Decomposition, the Final Phase of the Decadence of Capitalism’.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/terrorism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/121_ibrp
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party