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On 4/17/15 8:07 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
JUAN COLE: I see evidence of al-Qaeda thinkers, like Ayman al-Zawahiri,
who was the number-two man for a long time, before bin Laden was killed,
being influenced by Marxist thought, and radical Marxism. This is very
clear in the technical terms that the Muslim far-right uses. They talk
about a vanguard. This was a Leninist term. In some radical forms of
Marxism, activists were impatient with the working class, which seemed
not to want to fulfill its historical duty by rising up against the
business classes, and so it engaged in sabotage—not everywhere all the
time, but there were some groups that did that kind of thing in hopes of
provoking a class war, because they knew the business classes would call
upon their agents, the police, to crack down hard on sabotage and
workers’ activism and so forth.
I think that al-Qaeda picked up this kind of thinking from the Marxist
fringe in places like Egypt and so forth. I think that it is a
deliberate strategy on their part, the sharpening of contradictions, or
the heightening of contradictions, as it’s called. I think it explains
everything that happened in Iraq.
I just posted this comment:
Juan, I see you are doubling down on this business about al-Qaeda being
influenced by Karl Marx. I have deep respect for you as an expert on the
Middle East but I think you are in over your head when it comes to
Marxism. You are describing something much more akin to Blanquism. The
idea that sabotage was used to "provoke" the workers by inciting police
repression is simply wrong. Sabotage has been used by socialists in
guerrilla warfare such as in Cuba when pro-Batista sugar mills were
burned but it was not and is not a tactic for "sparking" worker
resistance. They burned sugar mills in Cuba in order to weaken the
social base of a dictatorship and not in order to bring about police
repression. The Cuban people did not need lessons on how repressive the
capitalist state could be, after all.
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