APPENDIX: Some Thoughts on Autonomous Militant Escalations
I will append to this essay some commentary, along similar themes and deriving from the same background Social Investigation and Class Analysis of the intifada movement in my area from what little involvement I have had, regarding what might be called autonomous militant actions: the bombings, incendiary attacks, robberies, etc. undertaken without apparent organized strategy or command by members of the Intifada movement. In particular these have had an epicenter in Northern California, around the city of Berkeley and a campaign of incendiary attacks there against police and against the UCB campus, flagship campus of a university system whose regents act as capitalist shareholders profiting from research and investments of endowment-capital which are directly implicated in Zionist genocide and other imperialist violence.
I will begin with the obvious and most important point on this matter: it would never be appropriate for I nor for any communist or aspiring communist to condemn nor censure the masses for taking up violent (though bombing infrastructure without people in it isn't even really violence in the proper sense) or militant means in their confrontation and negation of the oppressors, in response to the heightening contradictoriness of the unjust social and political-economic order under which they live. Emphatically the reverse. All such acts are commendable, and are waymarkers on the road of progressive historical development: we see the masses, the young student proletarian and petit-bourgeois masses especially, waking up to the need for historic class violence to resolve the contradictions of oppression and exploitation that face them, and readying to take it up. Unreservedly we should salute this.
History unequivocally cannot advance through class struggle without explosions of revolutionary violence. This violence, to fully deliver upon its revolutionary potential, must be organized correctly, and this is where I fear shortcomings in the present movement. First of all, adventurist petit-bourgeois youth radicals can do only so much with their violence. It is not possible for a revolutionary war to be ignited except by a leadership which is genuinely taken up as the Leadership for the broadest masses of the exploited, principally the proletariat, having taken on its shoulders their entire struggle and democratic will through mass-line style leadership and integration with the People, and through democratic centralist organizing. As I have said in the essay above, too many anarchistic youth radicals hold a spirit of antagonist contradiction and disdain, not unity and solidarity and mutually beneficial affirmation, to other social strata which are more put-down by capital than they are. This has the potential to be a death knell for any militancy they attempt. A group like the Weather Underground or the Red Army Faction, adventurist student radicals, were well-intentioned and indeed performed actions that were in an ethical sense good-- we should never think of censuring them for committing violence, nor should we censure any act that the present youth and student Intifada in the US has carried out. But the US is still a capitalist-imperialist power; so is Germany. So there was clearly a lacking in their strategy.
This is the second problem: the tactical eclipsing the strategic, the individual act occurring without a thought to a democratically decided and scientifically determined strategic line, the caprice of the moment in contradiction and negation against the long-term objectives. An attack like the historic ballot-burning attack against the Peruvian semi-colonial bureaucrat bourgeois state, carried out by Peru's People's Guerrilla Army in Chuschi in 1980, was not in itself so big or so devastating a strike. It occupies profound historical importance because it had been been appointed through democratic struggle and scientific preparation as the correct opening stroke for launching a People's War. Because, when it happened, the broadest proletarian and peasant masses, among whom the Leadership of the Party was embedded and whose trust it could depend upon, were ready to answer the call it sounded, to march on the enemy and bombard the imperialist bourgeoisie and their local lackeys with all weapons of war. This is how an ongoing revolutionary war, currently in a rut but nonetheless continuing, indeed coursing toward future victory with the new advancement toward general reorganization of the Party and with higher unity with the world revolutionary movement in the ICL, was ignited.
Chuschi could not simply stand as a single tactical act-- it was the beginning of a massive strategic campaign, which had been organized and planned, democratically and scientifically, and under the real Leadership of a Party of the proletarian masses. The comrades at Chuschi had just the things those autonomous, anarchistic militants taking action now lack-- a real strategy, a real mass integration, a real democratic-centralist Leadership to develop and carry out both. Do we and should we support revolutionary militancy? Yes, unequivocally. We support it advancing yet further-- and this is what that will require.
