Statement of Central Secretariat of Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (Indian Section of Fourth International)
As Revolutionary Marxists we unequivocally condemn the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The killing of thousands of ordinary working people is absolutely criminal and has nothing whatsoever to do with the struggle for human liberation in any form in any part of the world.
Indeed, this atrocity will undoubtedly make this struggle more difficult and aid the forces of capitalist reaction, something that progressive Indians have been seeing over the years in Kashmir. There, too, the rise of extremely communal and terrorist forces has weakened the progressive struggle for Kashmir’s national unity and self-determination.
In occupied Palestine, there is apparently no shortage of young men willing to sacrifice themselves as human bombs against the Israeli population. However, apart from being morally repugnant, such indiscriminate acts are a complete political dead-end.
Each suicide bomber who carries out his or her mission in an Israeli town, is actually weakening the Palestinian struggle and helping strengthen the hand of the Israeli regime and its US backers.
Such acts as indiscriminate bomb blasts, the use of suicide bombers, etc., fail in their objectives, because even when the event results in the death of a few notorious oppressors, the ruling classes find replacements, while they exploit cynically the event to draw attention away from the far greater acts of terrorism their state-sanctioned, legitimate" violence involves.
Thus, were the mass action based intifada to be replaced by such acts, the likely consequence would be, the death, not only of a few hated figures, but also of innocent civilians, which in turn would be powerful elements in driving the Israeli masses towards the most reactionary responses and inhibit the development of any radical opposition forces among them.
Throughout the history of the modern socialist movement, revolutionary Marxists have carried out a fierce polemic against the policy of assassination that is, the killing of hated figures of an oppressive regime. Our objection to this kind of terrorism is not only based on morality – but on the grounds that it simply does not work.
The ruling class can always replace individuals. This is true even of authoritarian regimes. This is therefore particularly the case in bourgeois democracies. However devoid of real popular control be a bourgeois democracy, with the great weakening of a genuine socialist democratic alternative, the popular masses tend to identify substantially with it.
To carryout terrorist attacks in a bourgeois democracy creates a hostile impression in the mind of significant sections of the masses about even the best of causes.
Furthermore and most importantly, employed as a strategy, such terrorist acts actually demobilise the mass movement. Only the struggle of the masses can change society.
The combat of a small band of terrorist-avengers relegates the masses to the sidelines and makes them mere spectators of a contest between the terrorists and the regime, rather than participants in their own liberation. Even morally speaking, such acts are therefore repugnant, insofar as they go against the self-emancipatory struggles
Moreover, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon represent a completely different kind of terrorism: the wanton and indiscriminate killing of civilians is part of the methodology of imperialism and its accomplices, not of the progressive forces fighting for liberation from this inhuman system.
Those who have organised these attacks are no part of any progressive anti-imperialist struggle.
We differ totally from those like CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat or others, who see in this terrorism an extreme form of anti-imperialism.
In a struggle between two extreme reactionaries, both products of late capitalism, an age of political, economic, moral degeneration of world capitalism, it is not the duty of revolutionary Marxists to choose the lesser evil between them, but to point out that the way ahead lies through fighting both of them.
It might be argued that even such terrorism is de facto anti-imperialist. This is to confuse between the objective conditions that gave rise to such political movements, and their actual character.
There is a need to distinguish between the anti-Shah struggles of the Iranian masses in 1979, and the reactionary forces, led and symbolised by Khomeini, who seized the leadership of that struggle.
In the same way, there is a need to distinguish between progressive struggles, even when they take recourse to terror – for example the IRA at various times, different national liberation movements, and Maoist political currents in different countries – and clearly reactionary movements.
The situation is more complex in non-imperialist countries, where even right-wing forces, including those using terrorism, can use anti-imperialist rhetoric. But in judging them, one has to clearly understand the relationship between such forces and the working class and other progressive forces of the countries concerned.
Revolutionary Marxists oppose any "war on terrorism". Military attacks by the US and its imperialist allies on the alleged terrorists and/or states that allegedly harbour them will not end acts of terrorism.
On the contrary, such a war will only result in more loss of innocent lives, and deepen the nationalist hatred of Americans that has provided a recruiting ground for the organisers of terrorist acts of the World Trade Centre type.
We condemn the diplomatic and military games being played by India and Pakistan. Both sides are trying to turn the sudden intensification of US gaze near South Asia to their advantage by offering military aid to the US in return for US backing on Kashmir.
Socialists are struggling for a world that is free of violence, oppression and exploitation. The only force which can accomplish this tremendous historic task is the working class and oppressed masses of the world.
Terrorism has no part in this struggle. But nor can the toiling people line-up with imperialism when, in the name of fighting terrorism, it seeks to smash all resistance to its domination, and to destroy all vestiges of civil liberties and democratic rights, thereby becoming the biggest terrorist outfit itself.
[This article has been extracted from a longer statement by the ICS]