Terrorism and apologia

Anyone interested in the kind of thinking which has led a section of the left, particularly the far left, into such lamentable positions on issues relating to terrorism, post 9/11, could do worse than to look at this article by John Molyneux, in the current issue of the SWP's journal Socialist Review. That is not to recommend the article - other than as exemplifying an impoverished form of reflection about political morality.

Molyneux begins by explaining that, though violence is sometimes necessary in the struggle against oppression, terrorism is 'unacceptable'. His explanation as to why it is unacceptable, however, comes down to a judgement that it generally doesn't work:

The overthrow of a ruling class and the economic system on which it rests cannot be achieved by killing or frightening even large numbers of individuals, but only by the struggle of a new class which is the bearer of a new economic system.
.....
The methods of struggle used by socialists... are all steps towards raising the consciousness, confidence and organisation of workers to act on their own behalf.

Terrorist methods contradict this whole perspective. Frequently, as in Madrid, they are aimed at completely the wrong targets, striking not at rulers or oppressors but at ordinary working people.

And why are ordinary working people the wrong targets? John Molyneux doesn't seem too sure. He continues:

This repeats the 'mistake' - or should it be 'crime' - so often perpetrated by the right, of collective national or racial guilt, ie holding everyone of a particular group responsible for the actions of the rulers of that group.

He seems to feel uncomfortable with calling it simply a mistake - and good for him if he does - so the word goes in scare-quotes. But then is it a crime or isn't it? Molyneux asks 'should it be' and puts that word in scare-quotes too, suggesting he can't quite make up his mind. We then get a hint of some awareness of what the issue here might be:

Even where targets are more judiciously selected, eg individual tyrants, direct and senior agents of the oppressor state, there is still a very high risk of error resulting in unintended innocent victims, with all the same political consequences.

At last, the word 'innocent' has put in an appearance. Perhaps he'll get there now. For it's not only about what works, what is politically effective; there's also the little matter of whether a political movement engaged in a putatively just struggle should randomly target innocent people. So perhaps John Molyneux is getting there. Stick around.

Molyneux now goes on to refer to the writings of Trotsky on the question of terrorism, and to the view adopted by the Russian Marxists, in their struggle against Tsarism, vis-à-vis the terrorist methods embraced by the populist movement. He writes:

The Narodniks were intellectuals who looked to Russia's vast and deeply oppressed peasantry, and whose aim was to overthrow Tsarism by systematic attacks on the Tsar and his ministers.

The Russian Marxists made a distinction between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, while the latter had all their sympathy, and their personal courage was always acknowledged.

Ruling class politicians and their media habitually denounce terrorists as 'cowards', 'evil' and 'subhuman'. The Russian Marxists had no truck with such notions, and never contemplated moderating their own opposition to Tsarism on account of 'the terrorist threat', still less joining forces with the regime against the terrorists. Their criticism of terrorism was always in terms of its ineffective and counterproductive nature in relation to the real revolutionary struggle.

I offer three observations.

1. A terrorist movement which targets ministers and other agents of a tyrannical regime, as the Narodniks did, is something quite different from a movement or organization which wantonly kills civilians at large, airline or train passengers, people at work or in restaurants or other public places. In the above passage the words 'the latter [terrorists] had all their sympathy' elides this distinction.

2. The earlier move we saw made towards the notion that 'innocence' might count morally for something is now lost in an affirmation of some sort of loose community between Marxian socialists on the one hand and terrorists on the other, albeit that terrorist methods are 'ineffective and counterproductive' - but, not for anything Molyneux is willing to say, morally criminal.

3. He blithely harks back to a debate that is more than 100 years old as if this contained everything he needed. Of course, it isn't just out of the question that something written a long time ago might embody important truths and insights. But as well as a few texts of pre-revolutionary Russian Marxism on these matters, there is also a whole literature and a long tradition of thinking, and codified norms of warfare and internationally recognized moral prohibitions, concerning what is and what isn't legitimate even in the struggle for a just cause. There is the notion, for example, of non-combatant immunity, with whatever conceptual difficulties it may embody. Molyneux may have reasons for thinking none of this - if he knows any of it - is of any use. But if he aspires to think in the present time, he could at least engage with some of it: to see if it might throw light on important questions of political morality and the normative restraints upon just warfare and just political struggle; if nothing else, to say why he believes it may be set aside. But no, a quick bow to Trotsky and the argument between Russian Marxism and the Narodniks, and he's done.

Here's the payoff:

Sometimes, and the Palestinian intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people, and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, 'condemn' Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance.

Socialists who claim to stand for a just world, a better world, but even in 2004, after all the horrors of the preceding century, cannot bring themselves to the thought that wanton mass murder (in the name of whatever struggle it occurs) is not merely ineffective, but a barbarity, a moral crime, or to the thought that blowing up children on their way to school is to be, precisely, condemned, condemned without scare-quotes and unconditionally - what a disgrace they are to a great historical ideal. Just throw in the subhead to the article ('the violence of the system breeds terrorism'), and you have all you need for the forms of apologia that have been rampant on the far left since September 11 2001.

I've written at greater length on the issue of revolutionary ethics here (chapter 2); or also here (1989 volume).