Description
Terrorism is a concept much-loved by the media and government spokespeople. But they are extremely selective in the instances they choose to designate as terror. This pamphlet presents a Marxist perspective on the question of terrorism. In the modern world, the wholesale state terror of the major capitalist powers is far more pervasive and on a far more massive scale than any desperate acts by small oppositional groups. Generally employed against the people of the Third World, state terror is also the ultimate guarantee against any serious challenge at home, as the examples of fascism in Italy in the 1920s and in Germany in the 1930s show so clearly. But what about those radical forces which seek to resist oppression by a strategy of individual terrorist acts against hated officials of the regime? This tradition has a long history but it is a negative one. Marxists have always opposed it on the grounds that it is a costly diversion; only the struggle of the mass of working people can achieve progressive social change. In this pamphlet Dave Holmes elucidates the fundamental Marxist position by looking at historical examples of the pre-1917 Russian revolutionary movement and the Red Army Faction in West Germany in the late-1960s and 1970s.