Rest of the text:

This is the second part of the booklet From Nationalism to Internationalism. We will publish it in six parts. This booklet tells the story of an activist over a period of about 35 years. For him, it is an easy enough transition from nationalist to Maoist groups, for almost all of them are fundamentally nationalist, with the Stalinist justification of the concept of "socialism in one country" for the latter.

Internationalists Communists of Montreal (ICM)
From Nationalism to Internationalism (First part) :
http://www.cmaq.net/en/node/38437

My years in the dead-end of Québécois nationalism or the nation over class struggle

July 24, 1967, I was working at the Expo 67. It was a beautiful morning and various pavillions reflected the sunlight like giant mirrors. Out of the metro, armed with my employee’s pass, I set off for the pavillion where I worked as a bus boy. The day before, General De Gaulle had shouted "Vive le Québec Libre!" from Montreal’s City Hall, De Gaulle had shown himself the loyal representative of a French imperialism in competition with its Canadian and American counterparts, and thus sought to place his pawns on the side of the Québécois nationalist bourgeoisie.

I wandered freely before starting work and wound up near the French Pavillion, these days a place where they sell dreams at high prices – the Montreal Casino. I was behind a rank of RCMP officers blocking access to a bridge I had to cross to get to work. I started at noon and would have been late if forced to go another way. And the boss was a stickler for punctuality. So I decided somewhat recklessly to break through the police behind them, figuring that since the crowd in front was breaking through, that I’d make it. To my great surprise, several cops threw themselves on me, while letting a group of protesting nationalists through. This got me a night in jail where I could see first hand that prisons were really jails for workers, young and old alike. Two weeks later, I was acquitted for having "disturbed the peace" ; yet I hadn’t shouted or anything, I’d only been trying to cut through a police cordon.
This forced sojourn in prison brought me into contact with some nationalists. A few months later, in January 1968, I joined ‘Rassemblement pour l’Independance Nationale’ led by Pierre Bourgeault (RIN). The party, in addition to Quebec’s independence, called for several nationalizations such as Bell Telephone. As far as I was concerned, nationalism was socialism. I hadn’t yet realized that the State isn’t neutral, that it’s always an tool for the domination of one social class over another.

One of the founders of scientific socialism, Engels, wrote

"… the transformation, either into joint-stock companies (and trusts), or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies (and trusts) this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to take ove the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."
Anti-Duhring

The RIN’s program addressed only the interests of the petty bourgeois and the rising faction of the Québécois bourgeoisie greedy for capital. The State itself was the ideal instrument to provide capital to this rising bourgeoisie.

June 24, ’68, I joined the riot "le lundi de la matraque", during the nationalist Saint-Jean-Baptiste day parade against future Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Luckily, I was not arrested, though 290 were.

During the summer of 1968, I worked for the Liquor Board – (la Régie des alcools (SAQ)). Just a month after I was hired, the union declared a strike. This strike lasted six months without the union (CSN) proposing a strike in solidarity with other workers.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by imperialist Russian troops, only confirmed my opinion that the USSR wasn’t a socialist country.

In 1969, I listened intently to radio broadcasts about bombings by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). The targets were not only anglophones as before, but had come to include places such as the Montreal Stock Exchange.

Minority armed actions and terrorism play into the political games of the bourgeoisie no matter who uses them. Thus the FLQ action enabled a bourgeois party like the PQ to set itself up as peaceful defender of established institutions of one section of the State or another in order to intensify its repression against those who had nothing to do with the FLQ. The FLQ action, though it had several workers in its midst, reflected not even a glimmer of revolutionary class consciuosness, but rather a workerist populism. The fact that FLQ members had been able to train in Algerian and Jordan camps showed that they were were an unwitting puppet of inter-imperialist contradictions. The media hypocritically denounced FLQ violence. They forgot and still forget very easily the great number of workers killed or wounded in the workplace. According to data gathered by the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada, 1,097 deaths were linked to reported cases of accidents in the Canadian workplace in 2005, which is a 45% increase compared with 1993, a year in which 758 deaths were recorded.

February 1969, students at Sir Georges William (now Concordia) occupied the university for twelve days to denounce the racism within its walls. In March, one demonstration for McGill Français mobilised 15,000 to 20,000 people. Students occupied Cégep Maisonneuve. In June, an action against the Union Nationale’s convention took place in Quebec City. On June 24th, at the nationalist St Jean-Baptiste day parade, a symbol was destroyed. We positioned ourselves at the end of the parade, behind the last float – the paper maché statue of St Jean Baptiste. (By ‘we’, I mean the gang of la Rive-Sud…The Rose brothers, Francis Simard, etc., all workers’or farmers’ sons.) Now this particular statue had replaced the traditional representation of St Jean Baptiste - a child with his sheep, as the nationalists had felt that, for the particularly religious Québécois elite, the sheep symbolized the submission of Québécois workers. So we in turn destroyed the national symbol by demolishing the statue - toppling yet another symbol of submission. The demonstration which followed, on other hand, continued the tradition of smashing windows, particularly those of unilingual anglophone businesses. Generally, there were demonstrations of more than a thousand people, and I never recalled demos of any smaller. Needless to say I participed par in these demos.

It was several years before this nationalist parade returned to Sherbrook Street.

Through the winter and spring of 1969, I taught highschool, often finding it difficulty to teach classes after having been up half the night preparing leaflets or putting posters up everywhere.

By summer of 1969, a lot of young workers and students didn’t know where to spend their holidays, and Gaspésie was the answer at the time. These students and unemployed youth wound up at Maison du Pêcheur à Percé, set up by the South Shore gang. For a next to nothing they could stay and visit the Gaspésie. This place was also happened to be a recruitment center for the FLQ. Local police, bent on driving them off, hosed the residents of Maison du Pêcheur à Percé with cold sea water. I remember travelling out there – Montreal to Percé was a single trip and vice versa. One such trip that sticks in my memory was on the way back to Montreal from Amqui – we had daubed paint over STOP signs and all other bilingual or unilingual English signs all along the route. My car was packed… Ignorant as we were, we hadn’t even realized that the word STOP had been French since 1792.

In September 1969, I had an important political decision to make. My friends, the South Shore gang, weren’t as yet felquists, but I knew that if I stayed in the metropolitan area, I’d have become a member, not really by conviction but rather out of loyalty to friends or peer-pressure. In any case I’d have been indirectly obliged,.

My teachers’ union had decided to send letters of resignation as a pressure tactic during negociations. To be honest, this was not the most effective way of applying pressure, and what’s more, didn’t do much to mobilize things either. And so I hastily sent my letter of resignation. A few days after having mailed it though, the union alerted me, too late, that this pressure tactic had been withdrawn. My letter already in the mail, I then found myself unemployed. I got married and returned to University of Sherbrooke to begin a master’s degree in physics.

Three weeks or so after my arrival in Sherbrooke, I started to campaign in the Action Committee of the League of School Integration, CALIS (Comité d’Action de la Ligue d’Intégration Scolaire). Despite all my political activity, I still attended Mass, and a few minutes before the end of this religious rite of a bygone era, I’d be handing out leaflets for French in Quebec and sticking them on windshields.

In October of 1969, 200 women demonstrated against the anti-protest law passed by the Drapeau administration. The law’s purpose was to counter any protest movements in Montreal. Of the 200 women who attended, 165 were jailed. A major demonstration of cab drivers against the Murray Hill monopoly was also going on. In November, there were also demonstrations calling for the release of political prisoners. And along the same lines, even though this was in January 1970, I organized a demonstration in Lennoxville near Sherbrooke, against the anglophone university with the slogan, "Bishop’s University for workers".

This mindless activism of the ‘60s - agitating for the sake of "doing something" is typical of anarchists or revolutionary activists. Through these actions, the experience of revolutionary working class struggle is rejected and outright caricatured. Illustrative of this crass ignorance of Marxism is the following quotation from the book by Francis Simard Pour en finir avec octobre: "We were against the theoretical squabbling over a comma or a phrase from The critique of the Gotha Program by Marx."

This contempt for the proletariat’s practical accomplishments led militants of the ‘60s to political death and to passivity. Many anarchists early in this new millenium found themselves in the same boat. They reminded me of chickens on farm, destined for the pot, running around with their heads cut off. Activists, just like certain anarchists, threw themselves into all kinds of activities or demonstrations without taking stock of their actions. This was the case throughout the ‘60s and even into the 21st century with regular demonstrations against economic summits rallying less and less people/participants. An international revolutionary party, a "head", they apparently no use for, as they throw themselves into action this way and that, squarely into reformism’s cauldron over and over, repeating the same mistakes. (1)

When organizing demonstrations, two political tendencies inevitably arise, but really nothing revolutionary. During the McGill Français demonstration, for instance, organizers advanced the slogan, "McGill Français", as others chanted "McGill workers". (It was the latter that I supported, though I’d been a member of the Parti Quebecois in the Taillon riding since February 1969). I call them the ‘capitalist left’, for though they take themselves for a ‘workers’ party, their outlook was limited to university reform without addressing the very foundations of capitalist society as a whole, and without any internationalist working class perspective.

I remember a preparatory meeting for that demonstration, that was held in the old premises of CEGEP du Vieux-Montréal on Sherbrooke Street. People from several groups were there, from leftist and/or nationalist tendencies. During the meeting in the auditorium, a few people notice the police filming them from the projection booth. Mario Bachand (he was assassinated in Paris under mysterious circumstances associated with the RCMP) intervened to protect police from some of the men and women who would have liked nothing better than to get their hands on them. We did destroy their film, however. Next day, Mario Bachand, one of the organizers of that demo, was beaten by police and jailed for several days. I recount this only to illustrate how it never pays to rely on the police, for they are first and foremost the protectors of the capitalist system regardless of whether you have defended them one day or not, for they will be loyal to no one but the bourgeoisie. [See Appendix III, Friend or Foe ? Marxism and police.] This action, in the ‘tradition’ of demonstrations between 1968-69, was peaceful more or less. We gathered outside McGill University, then dispersed along the usual route – Sherbrook Street West to Saint-Catherine Street West. We were armed with molotov cocktails and rocks. The Royal Bank’s windows as usual were smashed. At that demonstration, as the one before, there were always over a hundred arrests and injuries – a dozen protestors and two or three cops. Such was the ‘tradition of demonstrations in ’68-’69’. You would leave for a demo without knowing when you’d return, and if you did get back without a hitch, you’d be reeking of tear gas. I was lucky not to get been arrested at that McGill demo.

In June, the Union Nationale held its convention in Quebec. This party was in power with Jean-Jacques Bertrand, as Premier. We organized a demonstration. When I say ‘we’, I’m referring to the South Shore gang, again… We were all in the Parti Québécois – not out of any agreement with the party, but rather because it was a place to meet. We had left the RIN which, at its last convention, had voted to disband in autumn of 1968, inviting its members to join the PQ. To mobilize as many people as possible at that Quebec demonstration, we had to put up posters in Montreal. We didn’t have the kind of money that political parties had – much less the resources that advertising agencies had to pollute the city with their ads prodding us to consume. So no money for newspaper ads… And don’t forget that postering was outlawed. So we formed several teams to cover the downtown area and working class neighbourhoods during the night. My team (Paul Rose and I, that is) put up our posters to summon students and workers to the demonstration in Québec. I had to teach in the morning, but unfortunately we were caught by police outside Morgan store around Saint-Catherine Street at 3:30 in the morning.

A car stops alongside us… plainclothesmen. They get out, guns drawn, shouting, "Hands in the air!" As I raise mine, all the posters stashed under my sweater tumble to the ground. And so they have their evidence. The judge fines us seven bucks (equal to fifty today). We still spend a day in jail.

There is a nationalist tradition I remember, unfortunately. This was the commemoration of the rebellion of ’37-’38, called Patriots Day. One year, for its commemoration, the South Shore gang came up with an action to for this celebration. We made stencils, one stencil per letter, for former Québec Libre. Then the night before Sunday’s commemoration, we printed "Québec Libre" on the asphalt from Chambly to Saint-Denis-sur-le-Richelieu. In the truck, each comrade had his or her letter, with a car in front and back serving as lookouts. We did this every three or four kilometers to Saint-Denis-sur-le-Richelieu. Unfortunatley, it took over two years to remove this nationalist slogan from the road.

In spring 1969, I left the PQ due to the corruption already becoming entrenched in this bourgeois party. Pierre Bourgault, former head of RIN, had been convinced to run as a candidate in the Taillon riding. Ex-members of RIN were looked down upon in this party. This other guy, another ex-member of RIN, also wanted to run as a PQ candidate in the same riding. A convention was held to choose the official party candidate for the riding. This candidate had ties with the South Shore’s underworld. Membership grew daily – Montreal residents with fake addresses claiming to be South Shore residents… We’d proven it to Camille Laurin and to René Lévesque’s political advisor, Jean-Roch Boivin. It didn’t matter; it became clear to us that it was all an electoral game. We realized, then, that electoral shenanigans were normal for these bourgeois politicians. So there was a meeting. Camille Laurin chaired that meeting in the basement of Ville Jacques-Cartier Church (now Longueuil), and the local underworld showed up with their bouncers. We (the South Shore Gang) got kicked out by the underworld’s henchmen right before the eyes of Camille Laurin who did nothing. We yelled at that bunch of gangsters there, but to no avail. According to some who stayed, the meeting went ahead quite normally, suggesting that a large number of members of the Taillon riding had split from the party.

There were two PQ candidates running in the April 1970 elections, the official candidate and another not recognized by the party. The PQ’s official candidate had local mob backing, but they dropped him fifteen days before the elections, as he’d run out of money. The local mob then backed the Union Nationale. The liberal candidate was elected. We’d already lost most of our illusions about the PQ but this topped everything.

The taxi drivers struggle against Murray Hill

In October 1969, Montreal police were on strike. Taxi drivers were quite militant since they stood to lose their livelihood to the Murray Hill monopoly at Dorval Airport (now Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport). They demonstrated often against this company. And so taking advantage of the police strike, they carried on their protest in front of the company’s garage. Protesters pushed a company bus, in flames, toward the garage doors. Company security fired on the demonstrators, killing one of them… Fortunately, it was a police infiltrator. Some demonstrators had been shot and seriously wounded – among them, Jacques Lanctôt and Marc Carbonneau. I wasn’t there; I was in Sherbrooke like a caged tiger… In the hour and a half it took me to get to Montreal, it was all over. During the night, at Mayor Drapeau’s request, the army arrived to fill in for the police who were still on strike. It was like a rehearsal for October 1970.

****

The movement for the right to work in French and for French service in shops was still going strong. Even so, very few militants made the association with the struggle against capitalism. English businessmen complicit with French businessmen and politicians in their service did nothing to change that. Nationalist groups, from left or right, who made no connections with anti-capitalist working class, had this struggle under tight control.

Other demonstrations were held in various cities in Quebec for the release of felquistes Vallière and Gagno. This was Operation Liberation, as these two felquistes had been in jail three years without charge. We demanded their release. 10,000 people demonstrated in Montreal, chanting, "SOS FLQ". A few understood that it would take more than petitions to free them.

In January, I organize a demonstration against English-speaking Bishop’s University on the outskirts of Sherbrooke. Our agitation is chiefly based on the motto “Bishop’s it’s our money, it must go, it’s useless.” We hand out leaflets and plaster them around the city. The demonstration is held January 29th with temperatures at minus 25 °C. Around 75 people show up in front of Bishop’s, along with more than three hundred anglophone students. The police are there in anticipation of a battle between the two groups.

At the time, there were two maoists from Sherbrooke and during a preparatory meeting for this demo, one of them publically denounced me as a reactionary. I was shaken, me… a guy on the left, to be taken for a reactionary, out to divide Francophones from Anglophones, French workers from English workers… During the demonstration one of these two militants, Lori Rice, kept anglophone students from jumping us. It was in that period that I began to seriously question nationalism, which led the struggle in defense of French without making class distinctions. It was from there that I became a sympathizer of a Maoist group (from March 1970 to the summer of 1971). One must be at the "service of the people", two young Maoist students said to me. For a youth like myself, having received a Judeo-Christian education, this was very motivating.

The word ‘people’ – popular amongst leftists, as are the words ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ – carried an ambiguity that obscured social classes and, what’s more, the term set aside the historic role of the revolutionary working class.

My years in Maoism’s dead end or socialism in one country

Before going into my Maoist period, I would like to quote the Communist Left on Maoism:

"But Maoism had nothing to do with either marxism or the working class. The Mao faction only took over the Chinese Communist Party after the massacres of the workers in Shanghai and Canton in 1926-7. Mao based the CCP on the “bloc of four classes” and his takeover of China in October 1949 was not a proletarian revolution. What Mao did was copy the brutal planning aspects of Stalinist state capitalism and institute an arbitrary regime which resulted in the massacre of millions. (Over 30 million died in the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 alone.)

From the late sixties on, Maoism claimed to be a Marxist current and made some inroads into the petty bourgeois student milieu in the metropoles. Both here and in capitalism’s periphery the Maoists encouraged their followers to act as cheerleaders for the Chinese ruling class as they struggled to establish their place in the imperialist order. In Asia, Africa and South America their adherents joined armed factions supporting national liberationist and/or left democratic warlords as factions of the bourgeoisie struggled to carve up the capitalist cake. Luckily, the twists and turns of the Chinese rulers have meant that they and their followers have become less and less credible in their efforts to present their political positions as stemming from a Marxist understanding."
Trotsky and Trotskysm published by Communist Workers Organization (IBRP)

So we started a student newspaper on the campus of University of Sherbrooke. We called it l’Estrien Rouge. Réal Caouette, deputy creditise, inadvertantly gave us publicity. With the appearance of the first issue, Caouette denounced it in the Chamber of Commons in Ottawa. Needless to say, our circulation increased – up to 650 issues a month. But in the end, it was the bourgeosie who gained most from this publicity, as it lent credence to the labelling of Maoists as ‘communists’. In our first issue, we denounced Marc-André Lavallée for wanting to present himself as a PQ candidate in Sherbrooke at the convention. He had been in collusion with an American company, Corning Glass, as he worked at University of Sherbrooke’s hospital (CHUS - Centre Hospitalier de l’université de Sherbrooke). So he never showed up at the convention. And we unwittingly participated in this electoral circus.

At a small demonstration in Ottawa, the Maoist group – which would later become the CPC (m-l) – demonstrated against American aggression in Vietnam. For an hour, we marched in front of the American Embassy guarded by GI’s. We amused ourselves by passing within 20 centimeters of their noses. While at the same time and place, neo-nazis demonstrated in support of American aggression. The neo-nazis were obviously looking for a fight and – with the aid of police (sic !) – they end up rushing us into one hell of a brawl. The outcome: thirteen of fifty demonstrators arrested. Those who stayed decided to go demonstrate in front of the Soviet Embassy, since the USSR and the United States were both imperialist powers. For the CPC (m-l), the USSR had been an imperialist power only since "revisionists" under Khrushcev had come to power. According to them, the USSR sabotaged the struggle of Vietnamese people against American imperialism while "socialist" China was on the side of the people. The reality was quite different; it was a war between imperialist powers – China included – on the backs of Vietnamese workers and peasants.

The protesters arrested at the US Embassy were sentenced to two months in jail, one of whom was Lori Rice, one of the Maoists from Sherbrooke. They even staged a hunger strike for twenty days. Of course, these activists, consciously or not, played the game of rising Chinese imperialism.

The Vietnamese War continued without let-up. Then a neighbouring country which up to then had been "neutral", Cambodia, fell victim to a coup d’etat organized with the aid of American secret services. Thus, three kinds of war were being waged simultaneously in Indochina: an interimperialist war in Vietnam, chiefly conducted by American soldiers; one in Cambodia with clashes between pro-American Vietnamese and Cambodians; and finally, a war in Laos fomented by the CIA. So, three types of wars were waging five years later accomplishing the victory of Russian imperialism over American imperialism in Vietnam and Laos, and the victory of Chinese imperialsm in Cambodia.

Mao with his strategy of reinforcing Chinese imperialism called upon "peoples of the world to unite to strike down the American aggressors and their lackeys". We can never emphasize enough – that so-called Maoist internationalism is not workers’ internationalism – what’s worse, it is opposed to the best interests of the proletariat. The fact is, he called for the bourgeosie of surrounding capitalist and other imperialist powers to support his struggle to consolidate Chinese state capitalism. This is who Mao really had in mind in his address "people of the world".

In Sherbrooke, our little group of Maoists decided to put up posters regarding this statement. We did our postering, venturing out in my old Renault with no reverse. We grouped ourselves in teams of three.

On putting up a poster, and asking if it was straight (as it was still dark), I heard this "Yes", in a voice I didn’t recognize. I turned to find myself face to face with a policeman. There were three different reactions among us – the biggest, a very strong character, griped about it, but then pead guilty and was slapped with a fine; my comrade, Mo, pleaded not guilty and was acquitted. As for me, I never even showed up for my day in court.

In July 1970, I travelled through several countries in Europe, stopping here and there to visit some Maoists whose addresses I had. In France, Italy, Germany and Belgium, I managed to meet several Maoists. In France, I ran into a Québécois, a member of one of the numerous "communist " parties. There were two "communist " parties, the pro-soviet PCF and a pro-Chinese party outlawed since June ’68. The Québécois had been a member of the latter party. The literature produced by this Maoist party was banned and it put out a newspaper, l’Humanité Rouge (Red Humanity), on blue paper. From this trip, I returned to Canada with a whole suitcase full of Maoist propaganda in different languages. Today, unfortunately, I wonder how many naive and uninformed militants have been recruited, just as I had, into these organizations at the service of capital!

In August 1970, back in Montreal, I was working as a chemical technician. That month, I met the Rose brothers and Francis Simard. While it was clear that they weren’t actually members of the FLQ, they were very close. We were strongly at odds over the terrorist action, which in theory took the side of the proletariat, obviously without going into any technical detail, particularly on the subject of kidnappings. I kept in mind that the kidnappings, would accomplish nothing and that in any case they would be replaced by more of the same or worse. [See Appendix IV : Terrorism, a War Weapon of the Bourgeoisie]. We parted on this fundamental debate for the working class: international workers revolution or bourgeois actions, terrorism and kidnapping.

(1) See Revolutionary Perspectives – 42, The Barcelona May Days of 1937 to understand the anarchist CNT’s act of sabotage. http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2007-06-01/the-barcelona-may-days-of-...

Appendix III

Friend or Foe ? Marxism and police

http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-03-01/friend-or-foe-marxism-and-...

Appendix IV :

…Terrorism, a War Weapon of the Bourgeoisie
In history, terrorism appears as the mode of expression of social classes which have no historical future and whose very survival is questionned by the objective evolution of society.
In the watershed of the 19th and 20th centuries, the petit-bourgeois classes, the artisans in the process of proletarization, the shopkeepers and the ruined little landowners, etc., gave birth to a form of terrorism, of individual violence without historical perspective. In West Europe (France, Italy, etc.) as well as in Rusia (Narodniks), those retrograde expressions have had sometimes an echo within the working class in its process of political constitution and formation. The experience of the struggle, the October Revolution, the International Communist had settled with this question a century ago.
We mostly see since the last half of the 20th century in the imperialist relations that terrorism has became an essential tool for the great and middle powers in the fierce competition which opposes the ones to the others. We remember the "Baader group" or the "Red Brigades" which were in the news in the years 1970's and that it's well known today they were manipulated by the Rusian or American secret services of that time. It goes without saying that the West services utilized the same type of groups and manipulations even though we know less their secrets.
The fact the terrorist acts cause tens or hundreds of victims amongst the civil population is of no importance for a class whose unique survival as ruling class implies every day, every hour, the torture of hunger, of misery, of death, of the overexploitation for millions of proletarians and sub-proletarians of the "third world".
But, if the "ordinary terror" of the capitalist States is for maintaining the working class under its yoke, terrorism raised up as a mean of pressure and intimidation adressed to the concurrent capitalist States isn't directed, in itself, to the working class. Even though the workers are the first victims of these actions of imperialist war.
Mistaking on this point, understanding terrorism as a direct and aimed attack against the workers, is misunderstanding the class nature of present terrorism, is ignoring the role that the anti-terrorism campaign is firstly playing for taking off the workers behind their national flags. One way or another, even maybe with the best intentions of the world, it's becoming the accomplices of the nationalist and chauvinistic campaigns of the bourgeoisie.
It's precisely the bourgeoisie of all the central countries which has firstly aroused, encouraged, financed, nourished terrorism at the political and military levels, which it pretends today to fight. Since the September 11th 2001 attacks, there have been a lot of reference about the connections of all natures between what it's called the "Al Qaïda network" and the American State. It's the same for the training camps of the different terrorist nebulas which have been largely favoured and headed by the great powers as in Afghanistan, in Pakistan or even on the British ground.
And when we see multiplying the attacks in regions as central as the United States, initiator of the "war against terrorism", Spain, one of the "opponents" to the Americain military intervention in Iraq, and today Great-Britain, regions of world amongst the more "watched", the more "informed" and equipped with the more sophisticated preventive means against terrorism, then no more doubt can persist about the meaning of the terrorist attacks they've suffered.
Since September 2001, the international bourgeoisie has perfectly perceived all the advantage it could get from the attacks against the New-York Twin Towers in order to make advance its warlike solution.
"It's a time we must seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaked. All the pieces are in movement. Soon, they'll be set up again. Before they do so, let's reorganize this world around us" [re-translated by us from french newspaper translation. We don't have the original english version]. Such were the comments about the event just occurred in New-York that Tony Blair made at the Labor Party during its Conference of October 2nd 2001. In other words : the bombings of September 11th have created a situation which opens up the possibility of a new organisation of the forces on the imperialist scene, let's exploit it for the best of our interests.
The utilization to imperialist goals of those attacks is clear today. It's in the name of a large plan of "war against terrorism" that the military interventions, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, have been led…

…Today, no doubt is no more possible about the nature of terrorism : it is a warlike weapon exclusively reserved and submitted to the bourgeoisie. Actually, it is the interests of the international bourgeoisie which serve the bombings realized by the terrorist groups or the kamikazes, presented as isolated fanatics. But if terrorism is definitively doomed to serve as method and warlike means for the rivalries between the main antagonistic imperialisms in particular, it is another danger which threatens in a much more insidious way the proletariat. It would be an error to believe that terrorism has got the working class as its main target because, thus, we'll end up by neglecting the much more threatening danger that anti-terrorism represents. This latter constitutes the master piece of the bourgeoisie's disposal directed to prepare the proletarians to the perspective of generalised war.

August 2005 Communist Bulletin Nº 32 - Internal Fraction of ICC
http://www.bulletincommuniste.org/francais/b32/index_2.html