Terrorism

It is a revelation to see how the mainstream media plays such a reactionary role. Withut exception it has been pivotal in whipping up hysteria and limiting thought to the level of bigoted jingoism. There has been hardly any dissent within the media to the mainstream view.The principal dissenting view is one which argues that we must understand the causes if we are to solve the problem of terrorism. This implies that capitalism is capable of solving such problems. Furthermore it suggests that it wants to solve the problem of terrorism. It does not seem to understand that capitalism actively creates terrorism to serve its interests. The only terrorism that capitalism does not want is terrorism that interferes with its interests. It has been relatively successful in curbing such terrorism. Indeed it comes as a surprise that there has not been more terrorism given the abject conditions under which millions of people live. This dissenting view makes little sense at any level. It represents a perspective that entirely miscontrues events. It fails to understand that direct force works. Coercion does eliminate terrorism under certain conditions. This is why imperialism maintains military resources. Because it is a necessary resource that does in fact eliminate threats to its rule. To say that the cause of terrorism must be first understood wears thin. The imperialist bourgeoisie are not unaware as to the cause of this terrorism. This is precisely why it uses force. Its understanding has led it to the view that organised violence is the way to curb and even eliminate it. Indeed imperialism can only exist by creating the very causes of terrorism. Consequently force is the only way that it can curb and even eliminate terrorism. If it were merely a matter of understanding and then applying a rational solution there would be no need for a state. If imperialism could solve the causes of terrorism without resorting to force it would have done so a long time ago. To then attribute the problem to an issue of the lack of enlightenment among the bourgeoisie is an subjective idealism that merely sustains utopian illusions in capitalism. The mass media has been exaggerating the power of islamic fundamentalism and the strenght of jihad. The Islamic world is every bit as fractured as the Christian world. This is because it economic conditions determine the character of religious ideology. Consequently there will obtain variations in the character of Islam depending on the specific objective conditions that obtain within the different regions and among the different classes and fractions of classes. Consequently the call for a holy jihad involving all Muslims is the call for a cross class alliance. It is an idealist call that fails to adequately understand the existing objective conditions. It is a call that sees religion as the primary condition that determines behaviour. This is a grossly idealist conception that fails to understand that the reverse relation is the reality.There has been a failure to understand the nature of Islamic fundamentalism from within a class context. Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary right wing bourgeois religious ideology and politics. It is an expression of bourgeois anti-imperialism. It is the political expression of the stuggle by Islamic capitalism to achieve the conditions that facilitate the development of Islamic capitalism independent of imperialism. Imperialist capital is so powerful that is strangles any attempts by Islamic capital to establish and develop itself. Consequenlty Islamic fundamentalism is an attempt to create the regional conditions that facilitate the growth of small capital under conditions that are emancipated from imperialist capital. Of course success here would lead to the development of Islamic capitalism into a new imperialist capital. But given that the conditions for such a development dont exist and cannot exist Islamic fundamentalism is essentially a reactionary idealist bourgeois politics that is ultimately pro-imperialist. This is reflected in the contradictory relationship the Taliban and the Iranian regime have with imperialist capital. Islamic fundamentalism engages in terror because of its inherent fear of the working class. It engages in individual terror as opposed to struggling to mobilise the working class against imperialism because its class interests are antagonistic to the class interests of the working class. Any mass mobilisation of the working class can lead to the loss of control of Islamic fundamentalism over the masses. Even where mass mobilisation takes place it is organised from a religious context in order to cloud the class question and in that way prevent the experience of the mass mobilisation of the working class leading to the emergence of class consciousness. But the sacrifice of mass mobilisation to terrorism means that Islamic fundamentalism can never achieve its goal of an independent Islamic capitalism. As a class the Islamic bourgeoisie is too insipid to effectively challenge imperialist capital. Only the working class is strong enough to successfully challenge capitalism. This contradiction explains the failure of the Palestinian masses to make progress. They are led by a leadership that fears the strength of the working class. Consequently it engages in actions that maintain and promote the polarisation and the consequent continued weakness of the working class. This means that the Palestinian issue becomes a self-sustaining problem that is never solved. Islamic Jihad and Hamas undertake a suicide bombing which leads to a reaction by the forces of the Israeli state and thereby the problem continues in a tit for tat spiral. Both the Israeli state and islamic fundamentalism seek independently of the working class to gain a political advantage in such a way that they can gain a hegemony that puts them in a position whereby the problem can be solved in their respective interests in opposition to the interests of the Middle Eastern working class. Islamic fundamentalism merely exploits the plight of the Palestinian masses as means of establishing itself in power. It is not concerned with the savage oppression of the Palestinian masses. It merely views their oppression as an opportunity to advance the class interests of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. However because of the inherent weakness of the Palestinian bourgeoisie it sees the need to form an alliance with other sections of the Islamic bourgeoisie to struggle for the creation of regional conditions conditions that promotes Islamic capitalism. This is why ther is now a movement to create an Islamic world with Suadia Arabia as its centre. This is why elements within Saudia Arabia have promoted the Taleban and the Bin Laden forces. The Saudi bourgeoisie seek indepedence from imperialism as a condition for the further growth of Islamic capitalism.The few dissenting voices from the intellectual community argue that Washington is the greatest terrorist of all. They cite the well known cases that show that Washington has much more blood on their hands than the terrorists that attacked the WTC and the Pentagon. They add that its terrorism has been a primary cause of this recent atrocity on US soil. The implication here is that if you condemn the terrorists responsible for this recent atrocity then you must equally condemn the terrorism of Washington. This is a rather abstract class free approach. It entails an abstract rationalism. Instead of understanding the class context of the recent atrocity and Washington terror it presents a class free abstraction that misrepresents the specific character of these terrorisms. There are different kinds of terror. The terror of an imperialist state is a qualitatively different kind of terror to that of the terror of a group that is base in an ethnically oppressed people that is being daily oppressed in a most brutal fashion by imperialism such as the Kurds and the Palestinians. To use the argument that Washington is engages in terror too is to collapse the these opposite social categories into one. The terror conducted by an organisation based in the former social category is a qualitatively different kind of terror to the terror of a capitalist state. The latter exists to maintain and increase the oppression of the working class while the former is a reaction from that form the object of this oppression. The terror of the oppressed constitutes formally a form of resistance however ill conceived while the terror of the state is constitutes a form of attack. Consequently both forms of terror must evaluated from a class context-politically. Criticism and condemnation from a moral standpoint is mere liberal abstraction that merely obscures and thereby sustains capitalist oppression and the very terror that it is responsible for. In short state terror and the terror of resistance groups has its source in imperialism. Imperialist capital is responsible for both kinds of terror. Political criticism by communists of the terror of a resistance group cannot be mixed up with chorous of general codemnation that constitutes a virtual shibboleth. To confuse it is to be guilty of concealing communist politics while proping up bougeois ideology.The wholesale support for the response of Bush and other leaders of the ruling class by the US working class in particular and the western working class in general contains important lessons. It is indicates the extreme degree to which bourgeois ideology has the working class in its grips. When there is a critical issues of great significance it instinctively comes enthusiastically comes down on the side of the ruling class. Even though this is a product of the mass mobilisation of public opinion through the creation of pro-imperialist hysteria by the mainstream media and other bourgeois propagandists nontheless it still indicates that there obtains a deep-seated loyalty to capitalism even in more normal times. Clearly the specific character of objective conditions forms the basis for this.The response from the radical intelligentsia, with some exceptions, has been rather silent. The radical intellectuals from the universities who spun out their convoluted elaboration of this and that theoretical matter from a marxist standpoing have, on the whole, greeted the recent atrocities and their aftermath with silence. However there is nothing surprising these same figures of the radical left, these marxists etc., have never any comments on any the current significant developments. After all commitment on these matters might upset their cosy relationship with academia.It is clear that imperialism is exploiting the Manhattan/Washington terrrorist attacks as opportunity to restrict the civil liberties, to increase surveillance, to increase exploitation. Their war on terrorism has been turned into a war on the working class. The very working class that have been in the main the victims of such atrocities are the very workers that are to be the victims of the war on terrorism. They are to be punished because they have been victims of terrorist atrocity. This is the way capitalism opposes terrorism. Already its response has led to the mass dislocation of the hundreds of thousands of the Afghani masses. Again the war on terrorism is a war that inflicts great pain and suffering on the most vulnerable.If imperialism is successful in crushing Islamic fundamentalism in Asia this is going to mean the consolidation of Asian dictatorships. These are regime's that have largely existed under relatively unstable conditions that posed a substantial threat to their existence. This will mean that imperialism will find it easier to impose its settlement on the Palestinians. Under these new conditions imperialism's confidence will have increased enabling to promote its class interests in a more direct way.