3 - 9 January 2002
Issue No.567
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 3 - 9 January 2002 Issue No.567 |
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Terrorism and communism
President Mubarak's impending visit to Beijing prompts Mohamed Sid-Ahmed to ask whether China has something to teach us
The first year of the third millennium, according to the western calendar, witnessed a development with no precedent in history: the emergence of terrorism not as an accidental, marginal or regional issue, but as a central issue in the determination of humankind's future.
It was believed, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the downfall of communism, that the world had become unipolar, with the United States as its unique pole. But it soon became clear that bipolarity had not disappeared, and that it was still very much a part of the global system, albeit under a different form. If the communist pole was no longer there, a pole that could be described as the pole of terrorism was replacing it. And it is worth drawing a comparison between the poles of communism and terrorism in their capacity, at two successive moments of history, as the main world pole opposed to the western pole headed by America.
There are probably traits in common between communism and terrorism -- at least in the eyes of certain analysts. Revolutionary action can well be perceived as destructive and subversive. It certainly is in a certain way, if only because it seeks to destroy the existing order. But communism is a theory based on hope, on the liberation of humankind from the exploitation of man by man and the establishment of a new, more equitable, world order. That, at least, is the ambition of communist theory, as developed by Karl Marx, irrespective of the difficulties it came up against in practice.
Other analysts see nothing in common between terrorism and communism. The communist pole was made up of a bloc of states committed to Marxist ideology in confrontation with a western bloc of states which espoused the values of capitalism. No state openly declares advocating terrorism; any state that offers sanctuary to a given terrorist group will do so secretly while condemning terrorism in public. Communism proceeds from the assumption that revolutionary destruction is in the aim of replacing a given order by a better one. Terrorism has no substitute to replace the order it seeks to destroy.
Communism succeeded in building a great power, the Soviet Union. But the power of the Soviet state derived more from its military might and its ability to achieve a certain parity in the arms race with the capitalist West than from the results it achieved in improving the welfare of the Soviet citizen.
Communism did not exclude bringing about social change by peaceful means whenever possible. It did not consider violence to be necessary in all conditions and, indeed, advocated peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and socialist systems. In other words, it proceeded from the premise that mutual destruction was not a fatality. That is not the case of terrorism, which cannot envisage coexisting with the established order under any circumstances.
It is not surprising that terrorists steeped in this rationale consider the killing of human beings to be just one of the weapons in their all-out war against world order. What is surprising is when the established world order responds in kind, as has been the case in the way the war was conducted in Afghanistan. The mass slaughter of Arab Afghan and Taliban prisoners of war in Mazar-i-Sharif and elsewhere had less to do with imposing justice than it did with exacting vengeance. The confrontation between terrorism and world order is an existential one. As Bush put it, what is required from the international community is to stand with America against terrorism, and whoever does not will be seen as siding with terrorism against America. As to the terrorists themselves, the only way to deal with them is to kill them.
From this perspective, we can say that terrorism replacing communism as the pole opposed to the American pole is a step backwards on the international level, a step further away from civilised behaviour. It has not confirmed the validity of the claim made by the advocates of capitalism that the elimination of communism will advance the cause of civilisation.
A question worth asking is whether the replacement of communism by terrorism as the anti-capitalist pole is a temporary phenomenon or one that can be expected to live on for a long time to come. In other words, can there be a return to the pre-September 11 situation? To overcome the post-September 11 situation, a qualitative leap forward, not backwards, is needed. With terrorism bringing the two poles of the former bipolar world order closer together, the deepest contradiction is no longer between East and West but between North and South. We have witnessed a rapprochement between Russia and America, the emergence of a pole bringing together the Christian world against a bloc attributed to the South, to underdevelopment, more specifically, to the Arab-Islamic world. This is a development that cannot go back to the pre-September 11 situation.
Actually communism as perceived by Marx in the 19th century was very different from the communism applied in the 20th century. Marx's outlook was shaped by the reality of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century. His conception of a post-capitalist society was one related to the implementation of developed capitalism. But what actually happened was that socialism took root in agricultural societies like Russia and China, not in developed industrial societies like Great Britain, Germany or the United States. This raised the question of whether the socialism witnessed in the 20th century was true to Marx's vision, or whether it was a product of underdevelopment which cannot be identified with a developed-post capitalist society.
This brought into being a deeply distorted socialism, whose ability to achieve military parity with the developed capitalist world (as a prerequisite for survival) exacted a heavy price in terms of the social and economic development of the states which adopted it. It was this which finally brought about the breakdown of communism as a world pole.
Communism tried to build its study of society and the inevitability of social change on a scientific approach. Contrary to terrorism, communism considers the establishment of a revolutionary theory a necessary prerequisite for revolutionary action. Action that is not based on a revolutionary theory cannot be considered revolutionary. This puts forward a question related to the Palestinian Intifada: Is the Intifada revolutionary or terroristic? How to make the distinction? Was it triggered by hope or by despair? Was it an expression of revolutionary action of frustration because of the failure to achieve the revolutionary objective of national liberation and independence, the breakdown of the peace process at the Camp David summit between Clinton, Arafat and Barak and its total collapse with Sharon's ascension to power in Israel? While it is impossible to consider revolutionary action for statehood and national liberation as totally devoid of a revolutionary content, resisting occupation need not in all cases observe a correct revolutionary line. Killing innocent civilians is in all cases barbaric in character and cannot be attributed to civilised conduct.
It can be useful in this case to draw lessons from the Chinese experiment. It is said that China launched its Cultural Revolution out of frustration at its inability to achieve its revolutionary objectives in the context of severe underdevelopment. That may be the case, but 30 years on China is no longer driven by despair. Today the Chinese leadership has opened the country up to foreign investment, particularly to Chinese capital from Hong Kong, Singapore and other strongholds of Chinese capitalism outside mainland China, as well as from Taiwan, no friend of revolutionary China.
This feature of contemporary China has no equivalent in history. China seems to have learned that communism can flourish only in a post-capitalist, not in a pre-capitalist society. Moreover, co-existence, as it established itself in the former capitalist/socialist bipolar world, is too limited a concept to satisfy the requirements of growing globalisation and integration. Either world society moves rapidly in the direction of still greater integration or the system is bound to fall apart and contribute to the proliferation of terrorism. That is, of course, assuming that terrorism is an expression of deep deficiencies in the globalisation process. Another possibility is that terrorism is an expression of the birth pangs of a new world in the making -- a proposition that should be carefully looked into.
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