Terrorism and the new left in the 'Sixties.

• Author: Bendle, Mervyn F.
• Position: 160220524
• Pages: 8(21)

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. (1) 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, (2) while a feature newspaper article declared shortly after September 11 that it was "Payback for a bully who had it coming". (3)

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". (4) 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". (5) 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. (6) 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. (7) 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. (8) 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. (9)

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". (10) 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. (11)

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. (12) 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. (13)

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...