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Petty-bourgeois terrorism on an Islamic Matrix Strikes Brussels Twice

The proletarian response must not be solidarity with governments and the capitalists but the class struggle against all social manifestations of capitalism, petty bourgeois terrorism included!

 

 

On March 22 at 8 am two kamikazes blow themselves up at the Brussels Zaventem Airport; a little over an hour later another explosion occurred in the Maelbeek subway station, near the EU building. There are 34 dead and over 300 injured including 61 critically, the death toll can only rise.

"We were expecting it!" the Belgian leaders stated after the attacks; indeed not only the Belgian Government but the French, German, Italian, British and Spanish had anticipated something for a long while. After the attacks in Paris, French President Hollande stated on behalf of all the western imperialist governments: "We are at war!". At war, but against whom?

 The war that each and every capitalism conducts is a war of pitiless competition, it is a war that takes place simultaneously on different levels: economic, political, financial and increasingly frequently through military interventions, in countries in the distant or immediate "periphery" of imperialism depending on the interests in play. And now a war that "jihadist" terrorism, itself the offspring of the great bourgeois terrorism of the imperialist metropolises, has taken upon itself leading to attacks including those of the suicide variety, in the heart of the imperialist metropolises: New York, Madrid, London, Paris and Brussels.

Brussels, capital of the European institutions, has most recently become a prime target of Islamic terrorism. Prior to the current massacre, on December 23, 2011, a jihadist opened fire on a street in Liege, leaving 5 dead and 125 wounded; on May 24, 2014 a bombing at the Jewish Museum in Brussels left 4 dead; on January 15 in Verviers a jihadist cell that was preparing a series of attacks in Europe was dismantled.

By means of these attacks petty-bourgeois terrorism of an Islamic matrix, and not always directly linked to al Qaeda or the black Caliphate of Al Baghdadi, intends to respond to western powers for the decades of terrorizing its populations by being bombed or by being occupied by one or another Middle or Far Eastern countries. The latest situation in Iraq and Syria is characterized by imperialist military intervention – in which Belgium participates with its air force – and a continuous massacre of inhabitants by bombing, attacks by militias, and by governments supported by imperialism; this gives greater vigor to forces that have accumulated military experience and who thrive in the chaos of the ongoing wars in carving out plots of power over the cities and territories they systematic bleed , finding profits from trafficking arms or human beings, oil or drugs. To attract young people willing to serve them against the forces of major countries like the United States or European, these organizations need not only financial support and arms supplies; they also need ideals. Islamic fundamentalism pushes them to heroic gestures, like self-immolation and the sacrifice of one's life in attacks deemed necessary to "purify" oneself and to "purify" a corrupt and degenerate world.

This type of terrorism not only recruits its followers from among youth made desperate by unemployment and poverty; it also recruits from the petty-bourgeois strata from which emerge elements, which in order to give meaning to a rhythm of life marked by the daily search for the money to live, by the loathsome arrogance… of the richest, by daily vexations of a racist or religious nature, clinging to the myth of a divine justice that should prevail on this earthly terrain, justice for which they are ready to become instruments of revenge. It is no coincidence that these attacks are not directed against specific individuals, against representatives of political or economic powers found guilty of specific acts, but against the anonymous crowd, against anyone being by chance in a given place at a given time; attacks that sow death among "innocent people" as innocent as those who die in the bombings in Iraq, Syria, Libya, believing that somehow their attacks will change the course of things.

In reality this petty-bourgeois terrorism is only the flip side of the terrorism of the big bourgeois, the terrorism of the major states through their wars of rape and pillage, or those proxy wars waged by smaller states, in order to perpetuate their domination and above all supporting the domination of capitalism and its laws over the entire planet. After the attacks in Paris, and especially after the series of successful or failed attempts, it was clear to everyone that Islamic terrorism could easily spread in Belgium – this European country artificially created by the powers of the time, especially Germany and France, as a " buffer state " and a country where there has never been a real "national" integration between groups of different origins, Walloon, Flemish, and German and where, besides the monarchy, there is no real governmental centralism in the country. The "We were expecting this" of the Belgian leaders did not mean that they were preparing for this eventuality; it was a statement of feebleness as it amounted to an entreaty for the tutelage of a more powerful and better organized state; and indeed it is the French state that came to the forefront, if only because the terrorists of November and January in Paris came from Brussels and especially the Molenbeeck neighborhood where the Belgian police don't even dare enter.

The bourgeois press itself declared before the Brussels attacks that Belgium was a "failed state", a weak state built on a precarious "national sentiment". A country where many objective reasons explain the formation of a humus fertile for the birth of jihadist groups: large Muslim community with very few integrated and with high youth unemployment, easy availability of weapons, police inefficiency, poorly equipped and divided by different levels of administrative autonomy and rivalry between Flemish and Walloons (1). And precisely because Belgian national unity was precarious it was selected by major European states to be the seat of the European institutions: France would never have accepted that this office be in Germany and the inverse is equally true. Brussels appeared to be sufficiently inserted into the front for the defense of European imperialist interests (as evidenced by its colonial history), but with a nationalism too weak to challenge the interests of big states: therefore it has been "naturally" selected to become the institutional capital of Europe.

But the Belgian proletariat, both Walloons and Flemings, immigrants or naturalized, cannot have any illusions: the democracy and autonomy recognized in Belgium cities and neighborhoods are not those elements which provide for a harmonious civilian life. If ever they engage in anti-capitalist class struggle, they would be facing not only the forces of the "bankrupt" state, but also the military forces of Paris or Berlin, confronting more powerful and seasoned States that would replace the Belgian State to defend a bourgeois regime against the danger of a classist rupture that could spread to neighboring countries.

The exploitation that always and especially characterizes the capitalist mode of production never ceases because it is through the exploitation of the workers that capital derives its profit. This exploitation is part of a war that was never declared openly, a hidden and generalized war masked under the veil of class collaboration in the name of defending society and the national economy, civilization and democracy – a lying misrepresentation of popular sovereignty which only serves to consolidate the chains binding the workers of all nationalities, all races or religion to the capitalist mode of production.

When the fate of their profits are at stake, the capitalists never hesitate to cut corners on safety measures, to dismiss arbitrarily, to participate in the exploitation of proletarians of other countries, to intervene militarily around the world; if participation in an thieves alliance necessitates the participation in bombings in Iraq, they order the F16's to take off and bombard – the media never show the faces of those who are bombed. Capital commands, the capitalists obey; and in their noble mission to preserve Capital and assure the valorization of capital and in maintaining their profits, they act with all the cynicism possible in this bourgeois world.

We are in a period where the proletarians of Europe, intoxicated by decades of democracy and enjoying conditions notably superior to those of the proletarians of the countries on the periphery of imperialism, are not yet aware that the bourgeoisie will never allow its political dominance to be challenged; in a period when the imperialist bourgeoisie can still boast of the alleged superiority of its civilization by concealing the actual robbery detrimental to the overwhelming majority of the population of the world, in order to make the proletarians believe that a community of values ​​and interests unite them  to the capitalists in the name of the "homeland"; but as a matter of fact whole generations of proletarians were forced to shed their blood in the name of the homeland, peace, freedom, brotherhood, without getting anything in return other that the perpetuation of their own exploitation! At a time when many collaborationist forces can still distort the proletarian interests in peppering them with the bourgeois values ​​of democracy, nation, peace – a peace that the contradictions of capitalism will never guarantee!

Petty-bourgeois terrorist reaction is also serving the rule of capital, because it obeys the same laws, the only difference being that it is in favor of bourgeois factions who want to rip territory away from the dominant bourgeois powers. Bourgeois against bourgeois, they are fighting to seize the riches which are nothing other than the product of human labor, the wage-labor of generations of proletarians.

The war between imperialist bourgeois and "terrorist" bourgeois is not a war in which the workers should participate and for which they should sacrifice their lives, their interests, their cause. Their cause, that is, the cause of a class that produces all the wealth of society but which is immediately seized by the class enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. The cause of the proletariat is historically antagonistic to that of the bourgeoisie: this is not an ideological belief, but a reality that demonstrates itself each and every day in capitalist society. The proletariat will have to learn that in order to assert its class interests it must confront the forces of bourgeois conservation which are unleashed against it every time it tries to escape the exploitation to which it is doomed– not by choice, but by the social constraint of bourgeois rule that only in this manner can extract surplus value from wage labor.

The response of the proletariat to the terrorist attacks cannot be uniting with the capitalists and their governments to defend a political system that is fundamentally anti-proletarian. The proletarian answer can only be waged on the terrain of the class struggle, organizing itself for the exclusive defense of class interests and by recognizing as allies and class brothers the proletarians of other countries.

This prospect may seem utopian and insufficiently "concrete" today; but it is actually the only one that can be taken up again for the resumption of the proletarian struggle, centered on the interests of its own class, on its own historical cause, which is to put an end once and for all to the system of exploitation of man by man, to the capitalist system that has no purpose other than capital, the valorization of capital, and which obliges all human beings to satisfy its imperatives, the imperatives of the market, and not the needs of humanity.

 

No solidarity with the capitalists and their governments on the pretext of the struggle against terrorism!

No solidarity with imperialism, global terrorist entities which hold in their claws entire populations who they massacre and ravage to enrich themselves!

No justification for acts of petty-bourgeois terrorism in whatever form it presents itself!

Class organization for the sole defense of proletarian anti capitalist interests!

For the resumption of the class struggle in all countries!

For the world communist revolution, the only historical solution for the emancipation of wage-labor from exploitation and all bourgeois oppression!

  


 

(1)   See http:// www. politico.eu /article/ belgium- failed- state- security- services- molenbeek- terrorism/

 

 

International Communist Party

March, 23th 2016

www.pcint.org

 

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