Terrorism and the New Left in the Sixties

Dr Mervyn F. Bendle explores the convergence of militant Islamist ideology with the radical ideology of the New Left that emerged in the 'Sixties.

Article written by Dr Mervyn F Bendle, Senior Lecturer in History and Communications at James Cook University. Originally published in the Summer 2007 edition of the National Observer.

This article explores the convergence of militant Islamist ideology with the radical ideology of the New Left that emerged in the 'Sixties. In particular, it seeks to explain the contemporary support for terrorism expressed by many elements within the Western intelligentsia, which is heir to the New Left. As the September 11, Bali, Madrid, London and other terrorist outrages make clear, the strategic focus of contemporary terrorism is on attacks mounted against targets within civil society designed to maximise civilian deaths and injuries. This terrorist strategy is best termed existential because it seeks to undermine the taken-for-granted sense of ontological security that both underpins everyday life in liberal democratic societies and facilitates their dynamism; and because it is aimed not at forcing concessions from such societies but rather at achieving their extinction. It sees its enemies not as rivals for power within a shared political realm but as intrinsically evil and corrupt forces that have no right to exist and must be eradicated.

A basic assumption of existential terrorism is that civil society is now subsumed by the state and that the historic distinction between these realms has broken down. This means that civil society is a culpable realm that is a legitimate and indeed primary target for terrorist attacks. It is a view that is present not only in terrorist ideology. For example, the view has emerged amongst legal theorists that "virtually everyone contributes to a modern nation's military potential and effectiveness and so are legitimate military targets" of terrorist attacks, while a feature newspaper article declared shortly after September 11 that it was "Payback for a bully who had it coming".

It is also a popular position within academia, and a particularly egregious example was a keynote address delivered in August 2004 by the Nobel Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, attended by 5,560 registrants, the largest number ever to have attended such a convention. In her paper, Roy claimed that the distinction between government and public has blurred in America, and that the state has penetrated deeply into society, aided by propaganda and a compliant media. This has produced an "elaborate web of paranoia", and consequently America "is peopled by a terrified citizenry.... A people bonded to the state ... by fear". According to Roy, "this merging of [government] and public in the United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S. government from the American people", so that the latter have become legitimate terrorist targets by anti-American forces. Roy explicitly addresses the question of whether the citizens of democratic societies are responsible for the actions of their government and argues that: "If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism and the logic that underlies terrorism [are] exactly the same. [Consequently,] al-Qaeda made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their government", and similarly with the peoples of Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Australia, etc. In the face of global imperialism led by America, "there's no alternative but terrorism.... Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence", nor that such violence should be directed only at the state.

The popularity of such notions reflects the penetration into popular consciousness of the assumption that civil society and individual citizens have little or no unique value, autonomy, or integrity in themselves, but are merely components of totalised social systems and are therefore appropriate targets of terrorist violence. This outlook is a prime example of what Robert Jay Lifton has identified as "ideological totalism". This characterises Islamism's global mission to destroy American power and ultimately bring the world under the rule of Sharia law in accordance with the Muslim insistence on the absolute Unity of God (tawhid) as the foundation of all individual and social life under Islam. However, a secular version of this totalist worldview is also present within sections of the Western intelligentsia that are heirs to the radical ideology of the New Left, and is seen in their willingness to defend terrorism in various ways, even when it serves the interests of an ultra-repressive theocratic absolutism that should otherwise be anathema to the secularism of the radical left.

THE 'SIXTIES AND THE NEW LEFT

The 'Sixties (strictly speaking, the period from around 1965 to 1974) was an extremely important period of social, cultural and political turmoil throughout the West, involving the new youth culture, the anti-war and civil rights movements, the sexual revolution, feminism, popular music, global telecommunications, the counterculture, a massive expansion of tertiary education, and the New Left. Politically, this upheaval occurred in the context of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, growing opposition to the Vietnam War, and the split in the international communist movement. Economically, it was a period of great affluence, while culturally it witnessed widespread utopian expectations and an inchoate longing for human liberation. For a while, a vast range of possibilities appeared to open up. Paradoxically, in Western societies many groups exploited this period of unprecedented freedom to embrace extremist ideologies that promoted radical political change to the very system that provided these freedoms.

In terms of terrorist theory and strategy, the 'Sixties was a pivotal period because it saw the convergence of Western and non-Western revolutionary ideologies and political struggles, at a time when the Western revolutionary tradition had reached an impasse in its search for a viable Revolutionary Subject to lead a total social transformation, given the clearly non-revolutionary aspirations of the working classes in advanced industrial societies--a fact that the rampant utopianism of the period obscured. Historically, the Revolutionary Subject has been that social agent designated to lead the successful revolutionary overthrow of society and accomplish its transformation into utopia. Over the past two centuries this agent has variously been identified with the people; the nation; the industrial proletariat; the peasantry; the lumpenproletariat; the intelligentsia; the oppressed masses of the Third World; various coalitions of students, workers, artists, writers, blacks, women, gays, prisoners, and various marginalised groups; and, as we are now seeing, a global Muslim revival led by Islamist terrorists. Despite the extremely reactionary nature of the latter's theocratic absolutism, the contemporary left is attracted to it because it is perceived as the latest incarnation of the Revolutionary Subject.

The New Left's frustration with the non-revolutionary nature of the working class led it to conceive of itself as confronting a seamless system of total and malevolent power that totally encompassed Western society. It therefore looked to external agents of revolutionary change and came to support various campaigns of decolonisation and anti-imperialism, and romanticised Third World revolutionary movements and figures, coming to believe that their theories of revolutionary action could be pursued within advanced industrial societies. This shift involved the adoption of a neo-Marxist model of political economy that sought to analyse the global economy in terms of the "exploitation" of the Third World by the central capitalist powers of the West, whose very survival depended, the New Left claimed, on the "plundering" of non-Western societies. The "external proletariat" located in the Third World became the new Revolutionary Subject, while the enemy and the principal agents of oppression were seen now as Western societies. These were viewed as inherently corrupt and therefore legitimate targets for radical political action, including terrorism.

The New Left derived its name from the "Letter to the New Left" written in 1960 by the sociologist C. Wright Mills who had already published influential analyses of the American "power elite" and what quickly became known as "the Establishment", and "the System". In his "Letter", Mills called for a shift away from traditional union issues associated with the industrial working-class, towards the psycho-sociological issues of alienation, anomie, conformism, materialism and authoritarianism that Mills believed characterised the totality of life in Western societies. This entailed a crucial shift away from a traditional Marxist analysis of society in terms of inequalities arising from class relations within society to a libertarian or antinomian analysis that located the sources of oppression in the very nature and fabric of life in Western society as such. It was "the System" and the very structure of society that must be destroyed.

In broad terms, the New Left had two major streams: the libertarian and the hard-left, the latter being our principal concern here. The libertarian stream was associated with what became known as the counter-culture and was represented by people such as Allen Ginsberg, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, R. D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich, and the mid-career work of Herbert Marcuse. It evolved into a system of libertarian thought that has been described as remissive and therapeutic and became very influential in the human services area and particularly in contemporary educational philosophies.

The hard-left stream of the New Left was composed of various radical leftwing movements that were committed to political and social activism rather than to the cultural criticism that concerned the libertarians, or the labour activism that occupied the traditional left. Initially, it was represented by such intellectuals as C. Wright Mills, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Subsequently, it was dominated by an ideological amalgam of ideas derived from Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Regis Debray, Noam Chomsky, Andre Gunder Frank, etc., and structuralist theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The latter brought "an obsession with language, conceived, along with knowledge, as an instrument of bourgeois oppression", that remains a defining characteristic of the left intelligentsia down to the present time. The New Left also developed under the influence of disaffected members of Western Communist parties, who were reacting to the crisis of the international Communist movement, and other revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary groups, e.g., the Trotskyite International Socialists. In Britain, the New Left focused initially on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but later followed the American New Left and developed its most significant presence in the universities and amongst the intelligentsia. In Australia the New Left followed a similar path of development.

When the failure of the 1968 student rebellions in Paris and elsewhere confirmed the non-revolutionary nature of the Western working-class, the New Left became frustrated and even enraged at its impotence. As one historian observes: "The events of 1968 thus created a fragmented and bitterly dogmatic Leftist fringe, tempted by violence and unable and unwilling to comprehend the scale of capitalism's triumph." It came to see itself as confronting a seamless system of total power that maintained a comprehensive system of social control, surveillance and ideological hegemony, and that ensured the "masses" lived and worked in a state of "false consciousness", amounting to a form of "everyday terrorism", that prevented them from assuming their role as the Revolutionary Subject. This experience led inexorably to the notion that acts of existential terrorism directed at everyday life in Western societies were a necessary and entirely legitimate political strategy, given that the enemy was revealed to be the totality of that society as such, and not just particular class interests or groups within it.

Marcuse pursued the same form of totalistic analysis of the everyday world, adding the innovative idea that the very freedom that people enjoyed in Western societies was a form of "repressive tolerance". In An Essay on Liberation (1969) he deplored the "threatening homogeneity" of the "System" and called upon people to "resist and deny the massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism even in its most comfortable and liberal realizations". The idea that militants confronted a seamless, all powerful "System" of total oppression obscured by an apparent freedom quickly came to enjoy great currency, and later fed into the emerging view of Western society as a comprehensive system of exploitation that could only be successfully confronted by acts of extremism, ultimately including terrorism. As Leszek Kolakowski summarised this totalistic view:

"The existing order deserves destruction in all its aspects without exception: the revolution must be worldwide, total, absolute, unlimited, all-embracing [and] universal, and all partial reforms [are] a conspiracy of the establishment.... Capitalist society [is] an indivisible whole and [can] only be transformed as such."

In this fashion, the New Left adopted a totalised view of Western societies that was diametrically opposed to the principles of pluralism and separation of powers upon which those societies are based.

This tendency to conceive of society as a total system of oppression was present from the origins of the New Left. For example, although the "founding document" of the militant Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the "Port Huron Statement" (1961), called for participatory democracy and advocated non-violent civil disobedience, the frustrations of its campaigns pushed many elements within the SDS to the far left of the political spectrum, especially as it became clear that the bulk of the population in Western societies did not support revolutionary change. Already in 1964, leaders of the SDS were railing not against class inequalities but against "the Machine" conceived as the totality of American society dominated by the "military-industrial complex". Consequently, such groups came increasingly to look overseas for inspiration, especially to national liberation movements in the Third World. In this fashion the 'Sixties saw the emergence of "an international protest culture organized around master texts, chiefly those of Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Herbert Marcuse, and "revolutionary" icons like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh". Similarly, Black Power groups like the Black Panthers looked to anti-colonialist theorists like Frantz Fanon, and adopted his argument in The Wretched of the Earth (1960) that revolutionary violence in and of itself has a positively transformative effect on people of colour:

"Fanon indicted colonial powers and called on all the colonized to practice terrorism.... Although Fanon's theory developed from an African experience, his revolutionary rhetoric made him an overnight success among the world's leftists.... When international revolutionaries read Fanon, they saw one enemy: the West."

Such views were readily adopted by Western radicals and this was epitomised by John-Paul Sartre's extended introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, which endorsed Fanon's arguments about the cleansing power of violence and sought to provide militant political activism and terrorism with further philosophical justification.

Central to the New Left's theoretical response to the disappointments of the 'Sixties was its attempt to reconstitute Marxism as "a critique of everyday life" in order to explain the non-revolutionary nature of the working class in terms of its "false consciousness" of its historical and social situation. This produced a focus on the analysis of "the micro-social system, the social patterns of daily life [including] the family, sexuality, the work situation, cultural activity, verbal and other forms of communication, social interaction, institutions, ideology and false-consciousness". The New Left came to believe that it confronted a "quasi-imperialist logic by which the bureaucratic system of controlled consumption ... extended itself ... through the colonization of every sphere of daily life". Every aspect of life was now politicised, and the term "political" no longer referred "merely to the machinations of parliamentary politics ... rather it refers to an historical mode of existence". The critique had become existential. Rejecting the traditional Marxist focus on class struggle, this approach advocated "total contestation" within the realm of everyday life.

Michel Foucault was a key figure in this de-legitimation of everyday life in the West as an autonomous realm and its reconceptualisation as a deeply politicised realm of oppression requiring militant action. He identified a vast range of integrated systems that he alleged dominate the lives of everyone living within Western society. These incorporated psychiatry, asylums, medicine, prisons, systems of surveillance and disciplinary power, technologies of the self, the entire tradition of sexuality in the West, and the modern subject itself. Foucault's analyses provided a vocabulary that shaped the thought of subsequent generations of the Western intelligentsia and spawned a range of social movements that continue to violently oppose numerous aspects of Western society.

Indeed, Foucault offered no hope that people in Western societies could ever be free of the multifaceted systems of domination that both shaped and constrained every aspect of their lives: "We are engaged in perpetual war [within a] modern system of control and domination" that penetrates every aspect of everyday life. Wherever he looked in Western societies, Foucault saw only "polymorphous techniques of subjugation". According to Foucault, we are all products of an "on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours, etc." In Foucault's paranoid vision of society as an immense all-engulfing system of power, "the individual is an effect of power, and at the same time ... it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle." Everyone in Western society is both an agent and product of ubiquitous systems of exploitation and oppression. Consequently, "we all have fascism in our heads". In this fashion, Foucault further reinforced the New Left's conception of everyday life in Western societies as fundamentally corrupted by the systems of ideological domination that allowed capitalism to prevail and therefore rendered the realm of everyday life a legitimate terrorist target.

The extremism of Foucault's rejection of Western society eventually became apocalyptic and towards the end of his life he embraced the 1979 Iranian Revolution in a series of articles that show how the event resonated deeply with his life and thought, especially his fascination with power, systems of domination, and violence. He twice visited Iran in order to be present at the birth of an Islamist movement that would "set the entire region afire", forever change the "global strategic equilibrium" and mark the end of Western hegemony. For Foucault, the revolution was an expression of "an absolutely collective will" that "erupted into history", "like God, like the soul". He was convinced that the revolution was an act by the entire Iranian people, united in a mystical fashion, "to renew their entire existence by going back to a spiritual experience" found in Shi'ite Islam. Many of the revolutionary principles that Foucault embraced in the throes of his enthusiasm are now central to the strategy of contemporary Islamism, including "martyrdom" terrorist operations, the repression of women, the denunciation of liberal democracy, and the demonisation of the West.

THE CRISIS OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM

The present wave of Islamist terrorism with its complex global networks needs to be seen against the failure of the international Communist movement, after its split in the 'Sixties. The notion of a Revolutionary Subject had emerged with the French Revolution when it was identified simply with "the People". However, in the 1840s Karl Marx gave sophisticated theoretical substance to the idea, giving the role to the industrial proletariat, seeing it as an inherently universal class that would free all humanity, once it was driven to revolutionary action by the inexorable laws of capitalist economic development.

This gave rise to massive problems when the Bolsheviks seized power in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were a minority and sectarian Marxist party with limited support even amongst the small Russian proletariat. According to their theories, the Revolutionary Subject should have been the Russian capitalist class. Nevertheless, they had seized leadership of a Marxist-inspired revolution in a country that was based overwhelmingly on an agrarian economy. They were therefore confronted with the need to theorise how their Communist revolution might prevail in an underdeveloped agrarian society in a world of powerful capitalist industrial societies. They turned to the hope that Russia would be able to swiftly build socialism with the assistance of successful revolutionary regimes in the more industrialised parts of Europe. In this fashion it became absolutely essential for them that Communist revolutions break out and succeed in Europe and around the world.

It was for this reason that the Soviet Government established the Communist International, or Comintern, in March 1919. As its mission statement makes explicit, the Comintern was intended to overthrow international capitalism and facilitate the creation of an international Soviet republic, using all available means, including armed force. It quickly came to function in effect as a Soviet-directed global Communist party with national branches, all observing the principles of democratic centralism, which required that the rank-and-file membership commit itself unquestioningly to the directions of the leadership. In effect, this established a rigid system of control directed from Moscow. Consequently, the Comintern saw itself as "The General Staff of the World Revolution". While it staunchly insisted that the global proletariat was the Revolutionary Subject, it nevertheless subordinated all strategy and revolutionary initiatives to the national interests of the Soviet Union. The same may be said of the Cominform that succeeded the Comintern after World War II and presided over a series of purges of anti-Soviet personnel within the global Communist movement.

Soviet domination began to fall apart as the 'Sixties unfolded. This occurred initially under the impact of the Communist victory in China under Mao Zedong, which unleashed a new force within the Communist movement that insisted on the primacy of global revolution, and which also emphasised the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. While orthodox Marxism-Leninism insisted that the urban proletariat led by the Party was the true Revolutionary Subject, and regarded the rural peasantry as a reactionary force, Maoism focused on the peasantry as a revolutionary force that could be mobilised and led by the Communist Party as a part of a broad revolutionary coalition. The ultimate success of the Chinese Communist rural insurgency and Party's ascent to power supported this view.

By the 1960s, the Chinese were convinced that the Soviets were ignoring the central Marxist-Leninist principle that violent armed conflict between capitalism and socialism was inevitable, and that the Soviet Union was retreating from the global struggle for Communism. The Soviets on the other hand were dealing with the aftermath of Stalin's death in the midst of the Cold War and were not interested in what they saw as revolutionary adventurism. They were also concerned to retain control over their East European satellites, and this entailed military intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, with massive loss of life (thus accelerating a progressive disaffection of Western Communists from Moscow). The final rupture between the Soviet Union and China occurred in 1962, after Mao criticised Khrushchev for backing down in the Cuban missile crisis, and the Soviets supported India in her war with China. Both sides then cut relations and issued, in 1963, conflicting formal statements of their ideological positions.

This rupture caused divisions around the world, and had a crucial impact on the politics of the 'Sixties, promoting a Westernised version of Maoism. Some national Communist parties sided with the Soviets and others with the Chinese, and some parties split, as happened in Australia. Western parties were already under internal stress after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and ultra-left revolutionary factions and groups sided with the Chinese, with Maoist groups later becoming prominent within the Western intelligentsia during the subsequent period of student radicalism led by the New Left. Remarkably, Maoism attracted some of the most talented and prominent intellectuals on the left, including Sartre and Foucault, while it simultaneously promoted a brutal anti-intellectualism and an atheoretical revolutionary voluntarism that demanded that intellectuals abase themselves before the peasants and proletariat, who once again were promoted as the Revolutionary Subject--although only in an abstract sense with no connection to actual workers or peasants. Both Sartre and Foucault, along with thousands of other militants, dutifully performed such ritual acts of abasement.

In this fashion, the 'Sixties unfolded with the international revolutionary movement in disarray. Global Communist leadership was divided between two superpowers pursuing their own interests, while the loyalty and membership of the national parties was similarly divided. These faced the crucial question: was the immediate goal of Communism "peaceful coexistence", concerned with protecting the national interests of the Soviet Union as the heart of world Communism, as Moscow insisted; or was the task the intensification of revolutionary struggle around the globe, focusing on "U.S. imperialism", as the Chinese insisted? Inexorably, the more radical Maoist view came to prevail, and the Revolutionary Subject was no longer seen as located in the core countries of the global capitalist system, but was identified with the peasantry and anti-imperialist forces of the Third World, with which various coalitions of students, intellectuals, workers, blacks and various marginalised groups within the West sought to form a united front in campaigns of militant activism against their own societies.

DECOLONISATION AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM

The movements of decolonisation and anti-imperialism that had been underway since the end of World War II impacted greatly on the New Left in the 'Sixties and continue to shape attitudes and ideologies within the contemporary left and global Islamism. These gained particular momentum from the independence of India and Pakistan from Britain, and the Communist victory in China. National liberation movements and anti-colonial insurgencies emerged in Asia, Indo-China, Africa and Latin America, usually affiliated with either the Soviet Union or China. Vietnam and Algeria saw prolonged wars that led to the defeat or withdrawal of America and France respectively. These wars severely destabilised Western societies and profoundly shaped the radical intellectual climate of the 'Sixties. These effects continue to ramify through Western foreign and defence policies, as well as shaping global perceptions of the War on Terror. For example, the Algerian War of Independence polarised opinion within the French intelligentsia, the most influential in the world in the 'Sixties, and greatly affected the New Left. In particular, it appeared to demonstrate the effectiveness of systematic guerrilla warfare and terrorism directed at soft civilian and non-military targets. This demonstration was greatly enhanced by the film The Battle of Algiers, which was released in 1966. It was extremely influential, gaining an international reputation for inspiring and romanticising political violence and promoting urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism. It influenced many groups in the 'Sixties, including the PLO, the Provisional IRA, the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party.

Also of exceptional importance was the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, which formed an alliance with the Soviet Union. Ideologically, a major initiative of the Cubans was the Tricontinental Conference, which involved revolutionary activists from Guinea, the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Vietnam, Syria, North Korea, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile and the Dominican Republic. It led to the establishment of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, founded in Havana in January 1966, which had the explicit role of furthering decolonisation, promoting anti-imperialist and anti-globalisation campaigns, and supporting insurgency movements in the Third World. It played a key role in creating the framework for the wave of international terrorism that began in the 'Sixties:

"A clandestine world of conspiracy emerged in which direct-action groups of nationalist and social revolutionary ideology, sometimes both, were linked in an international network that consisted of various [terrorist] 'Red Armies', Palestinian, Basque insurrectionaries, the IRA and the rest, overlapping with other illegal networks [and] protected and where necessary assisted by Arab or eastern states."

Most significantly, these events demanded a theoretical reformulation of decolonisation and imperialism that could guide revolutionary activity undertaken on a global scale. It was at this point that another critical step was taken in the theorisation of the strategy of existential terrorism. The Marxist theory of imperialism had been initially formulated by Lenin, but evolved along several different paths. The Leninist version emphasised conflict between nation-states pursuing the interests of their own capitalist classes, such as that that led to the Great War, which Lenin insisted was an imperialist war. The later Maoist version saw the problem in terms of two stages, the first of which called for a united front of the peasantry, proletariat and national bourgeoisie in anti-imperialist struggle, to be followed then by socialist revolution. Another version was associated with the German Marxist Karl Kautsky, who elevated the class struggle to a global level, insisting that the primary conflict was between the various capitalist states on one hand, and the underdeveloped remainder of the world on the other. These latter two analyses were very influential after World War II and became the basis of the theory of "revolutionary internationalism" that placed all emphasis on the alleged imperialist exploitation of the Third World by the West, especially by the U.S., which was seen as the capitalist superpower reducing all other states to client status.

In the 'Sixties this revolutionary internationalism found influential expression in the dependency theory associated with leftists like Andre Gunder Frank. Dependency theorists argued that the "metropoles", i.e., the wealthy nations at the core of the world capitalist system, exploit the countries on the "periphery" of that system in order to remain affluent. They claimed that the latter are plundered for their natural resources and cheap labour, while providing a destination for obsolete technology and markets for the wealthy metropoles. Without these, dependency theorists claimed, the metropoles would not enjoy their current standard of living. Moreover, the theory claims that the core states ensure that the periphery remains in a state of dependency by manipulating the rules of international trade and commerce, and through various policies involving not only economics, politics, banking and finance, but also media control and education. All attempts by the nations on the periphery to reject these arrangements are allegedly met by the threat of economic or military sanctions.

This theory of revolutionary internationalism was a crucial moment in the ideological history of the 'Sixties. It marginalised the traditional Marxist economic analysis that focused on the forces and relations of production within capitalist societies, and instead focused exclusively on the relations of exchange that apply between societies in the global economic system, reducing the latter to a zero-sum game where any gains made by Western societies were inevitably seen as losses incurred by non-Western societies. Similarly, it also rejected the Marxist political analysis that focused on class struggles occurring within nation-states, in favour of a model that elevated class struggle to a global level, occurring between the capitalist states at the core, and the dependent states on the periphery who constituted an "external proletariat".

A CASE STUDY: THE RED ARMY FACTION

The logic of these developments can be demonstrated with a brief case study of a leading terrorist group from the 'Seventies. The Red Army Faction (RAF) was one of the most prominent terrorist groups to emerge out of the ideological and political matrix described here. Its aim was to overthrow the post-war democratic society in West Germany. The RAF developed out of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a terrorist group founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof around 1970. In accordance with the anti-imperialist analysis described above, the RAF advocated a revolutionary internationalist strategy, expressed through violent political struggle in the metropoles aimed at American imperialism and German complicity in it, but also against Israel and Zionism, which were seen as key instruments of American imperialism. In fact, the Palestinian Liberation Organization had been founded only a few years earlier in 1964 and the RAF established close links with it, building a network that allowed for joint missions and training. Another inspiration for its militant operations was the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighella, who published his extremely influential Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla shortly before he was shot by security forces in 1969. The book offers a romanticised vision of the urban guerrilla as a sort of utterly committed and self-disciplined urban samurai who is a master of his noble craft. However, it also provides detailed practical advice on how to disrupt, sabotage, and even overthrow government and corporate institutions, and was for many years the most comprehensive book on urban guerrilla strategy available. It was banned in several countries including the United States but remains available on the Internet.

The ideological position of the RAF was a mix of Maoism and Marcusean neo-Marxism. Its members condemned what they saw as the mindless materialism and fascist tendencies of German society and declared their commitment to violence in the service of the anti-imperialist struggle. The RAF became one of Europe's most deadly and feared terrorist organisations, attacking German political and business leaders and also U.S. military installations. At one stage it explored the possibility of using lethal biological agents as indiscriminate terrorist weapons. East Germany provided logistical support, sanctuary and training, while the RAF also received support from Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The group was organised into hardcore cadres, which carried out terrorist attacks supported by an extensive network of underground militants, and left-wing sympathisers who provided logistic and propaganda support. Its activity intensified through the early 1970s, and again between 1975 and 1977; it survived into the late-1990s despite numerous arrests of its various leaders over the years.

The RAF was heir to the anti-imperialist theories of the German New Left, and in particular to the revolutionary internationalism of its principal theorist, Rudi Dutschke, whose work incorporated the various elements described above. His position has been summarised as follows:

"Imperialism, not the proletariat, constitutes the totality of the world; the counter-revolution, not the side of the revolution, currently dictates the unity of world history. How can revolutionary forces assert themselves in this totality? The answer was: the subject of the worldwide revolutionary process is the poor, the oppressed, rendering the world's principal contradiction that between imperialism and the Third World. In the metropoles, enlightened persons--and that meant above all the intelligentsia--must unite with the suffering masses of the Third World, support liberation struggles, and themselves employ illegal, direct action against the state apparatus to weaken the imperialist powers."

As this makes clear, the RAF specifically declared that the contemporary Revolutionary Subject was not the proletariat, but rather "anyone who locates his political identity in the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World". This perspective dominated the antiwar International Vietnam Congress in Berlin in 1968, at which participants expressed their support for this strategy on behalf of the Communist Vietnam National Liberation Front: "The NLF ... has given us the task to organize resistance in the metropoles.... Our actions must ... include sabotage." Within a short time in Germany there emerged some 130 orthodox Communist organisations, 20 Maoist groups, and five Trotskyite parties, with a combined membership of some 80,000.

The RAF saw the United States as its mortal enemy and was committed to a war to the bitter end. In May 1972 it launched its "May Offensive", bombing two U.S. military bases, police stations in two cities, a judge's wife, and the offices of the Springer Press. In its subsequent communique the RAF claimed the attacks had been forced by the American bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbours. These, it declared, constituted "genocide, the murder of the people, annihilation, Auschwitz", and it promised to continue its "attacks against the mass murderers in Vietnam until the Vietcong are victorious".

As its terror campaign unfolded, the RAF was forced to confront the implications of its theoretical analysis. Like the American New Left, it found that a high level of commitment from its members drawn from the intelligentsia was not matched by a similar commitment--or even sympathy--from the worker class. Indeed, whatever initial sympathy the latter may have felt was drained away as the number of victims murdered by the RAF steadily increased. The inevitable questions arose: on what basis did the RAF condemn these people to death? Was just any American serviceman or German policeman a legitimate target, punishable by death, for the activities of an ill-defined notion of "American imperialism"? How had the RAF been empowered to make such life-and-death judgments?

Instead of recognising that these were vital questions that needed to be answered, the RAF responded with the precise type of logic that continues to characterise theories of existential terrorism. It decided that the reticence of the German people to ratify the terrorist actions of the RAF confirmed the assessment that the people had betrayed the revolutionary ideal. As Ulrike Meinhof observed: the system "has pushed the masses so deeply into its dreck that they seem to have lost a sense of being exploited and oppressed", and in exchange for consumerist goods they "excused the crimes of the system". The national proletariat had betrayed the revolution, while the imperialist enemy "systematically sought to kill those it could no longer exploit".

In this fashion, the revolutionary internationalism of the RAF propelled it into an abstract political realm where murderous violence against non-combatant civilians and the institutions of their own society was seen as a legitimate terrorist strategy. It fantasised that its terrorist campaigns formed part of universal history operating on a global stage. The Revolutionary Subject was no longer the actual proletariat of their own society with which they could engage in concrete political action directed towards achievable goals. Rather, the Revolutionary Subject had become an abstract "external proletariat" with which the RAF had not the slightest actual contact, while the enemy--the agent of oppression and exploitation--was one's own society considered as an inherently corrupt totality and therefore readily identified as a legitimate terrorist target.

CONCLUSION

The contemporary strategy of existential terrorism, presently undertaken by global Islamism, originally appeared in the West in the 'Sixties as the New Left sought to resolve the contradictions of its situation as an aspiring proto-revolutionary fraction of the intelligentsia stranded in non-revolutionary societies. The logic of their ideological evolution is clear. First, the theory of revolutionary internationalism relocated the Revolutionary Subject from the Western capitalist societies to the Third World, where it was identified with all anti-Western movements. Second, it imposed a moral culpability on Western nations taken as totalities and discounted the class analysis that had previously been the central concern of traditional Marxism. Indeed, it relegated the working classes of the metropoles to the status of a "labour aristocracy" who allegedly enjoyed their relatively high standard of living at the expense of the people of the Third World. Third, it explained the lack of revolutionary consciousness amongst the Western proletariat in terms of its total immersion in a system of power that permeated every aspect of people's lives. They came to be viewed as a reactionary force that had "sold out" to capitalism--supporting a system of global exploitation that kept the West rich and the Rest poor. Morally bankrupt, all the people in these societies were seen as mere components of a totalised system of evil--the capitalist state and/or Western civilisation. They had therefore become legitimate targets for extremist attacks, especially existential terrorism which focused on "soft" civilian targets.

After the New Left, the most important subsequent step in the theory and application of existential terrorism was not taken until the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was articulated in such key statements as 'The World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders", incorporating the purported Fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden declaring that "the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it". By this time, little of the original theory of revolutionary internationalism remained unchanged, beyond a Manichean hatred of America and a conviction that it is the principal source of evil in the world. Nevertheless, its basic principles remain intact: the Revolutionary Subject is now identified with global Islamism, while the dominant revolutionary ideology has become Islamist Jihadism. One of the most striking things about this development is the extent to which the New Left's obsolete revolutionary internationalism of the 'Sixties lingers on within the Western intelligentsia, obscuring its comprehension of this world-historical event. For example, just prior to the September 11 attacks, Edward Said claimed that "terrorism" is simply a label used to discredit "resistance movements", and that the "relentless pursuit of terrorism is ... almost criminal. It allows the United States to do what it wishes anywhere in the world. Terrorism has become a sort of screen created ... to justify what the United States wishes to do globally". (63) Similarly, immediately after September 11 Noam Chomsky insisted that America remains the world's "leading terrorist state", arguing that "terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That's what the World Trade Center bombing was.... And that's official [American government] doctrine".

Given the grip of this ideological perspective, it appears that the threat of terrorism can be reduced through ideological interventions directed at destroying its rationale, in particular by re-affirming the role and legitimacy of civil society. Such interventions are necessary because of the influence of the radical intelligentsia and the growing global role of transnational terrorist networks like al-Qaeda. Both take advantage of globalisation to communicate their views, carry out their activities, and expand their basis of support. Both lack a hierarchical core, but are based instead on affinity groups and sentiment pools of real and prospective activists who are then sponsored for specific acts. As recent analysts have pointed out, the various differences of these groups "are overshadowed by their readiness to coalesce and collaborate according to a common set of ideological beliefs". Consequently, determined efforts that discredit the ideology that inspires and sustains such groups should inhibit the growth and effectiveness of terrorist networks.