guerilla warfare and gangsterism

[black magick hustla]

This is an issue that has been popping up in the forum from time to time.

Is the criminal activities elements of guerrillas engage in are symptomatic of something else? are they just inventions of the bosses' press?

i think the reason why some guerrillas engage in gangsterism is that they are forced to go underground. Exiled from civil society, these people start fostering a sort of disensitized, warrior/gangster culture - in the same sense average criminal gangs do.

I mean if the brit soldiers murder one of your tight knit comrades, you are going to seek vengeance. which might include blowing up a disco with brits.

discuss.

[Little Bobby Hutton]

The British tried to say that the IRA INLA were gangsters, its a tactic used by the imperialists to discredit national liberation struggles.
Fuck thatcher shes wanted for the murder of ten brave men.

The senile old hag i cant wait till the ***** dies.

All power to the people.

[Robocommie]

I think he really just wanted to know more about why revolutionaries sometimes blow up discos. I don't think that's excusable regardless of class conflict.

[spaßmaschine]

Wow. The fact that you believe in something called "criminal activities" betrays the fact that you have assumed that the bourgeois laws that condemn class warfare undertaken by revolutionaries are fair and just.

Well, it's not just that such groups engage in activities that are "criminal" in bourgeois terms, but that such activities prey upon the working class. Using the PKK as an example, it's my understanding that they (or their affiliates) are quite involved in the heroin trade in the UK, in which working class people have at various times been murdered in drug wars between PKK and their rivals. In London they also operate protection rackets in the Kurdish community and are involved in prostitution/sex-slavery. So in other words, they operate like the capitalist enterprises they are. I am sure a similar story could be said about armed struggle groups operating "underground" in other countries.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Well, it's not just that such groups engage in activities that are "criminal" in bourgeois terms, but that such activities prey upon the working class. Using the PKK as an example, it's my understanding that they (or their affiliates) are quite involved in the heroin trade in the UK, in which working class people have at various times been murdered in drug wars between PKK and their rivals. In London they also operate protection rackets in the Kurdish community and are involved in prostitution/sex-slavery. So in other words, they operate like the capitalist enterprises they are. I am sure a similar story could be said about armed struggle groups operating "underground" in other countries.

This isn't a support to what the PKK are known for doing, but as someone that came out of the hood & moved to another hood with just different races, drug selling isn't an act of trying to be greedy, or bourgeois, or anything like that. It's survival. We are put through this systematic lifestyle where being a criminal is not something we particurally had chosen, but rather what was necessary to keep in step with the struggle.

[spaßmaschine]

This isn't a support to what the PKK are known for doing, but as someone that came out of the hood & moved to another hood with just different races, drug selling isn't an act of trying to be greedy, or bourgeois, or anything like that. It's survival. We are put through this systematic lifestyle where being a criminal is not something we particurally had chosen, but rather what was necessary to keep in step with the struggle.
I'm not talking about individuals doing low-level dealing to survive, but about the group playing a major role in organising and controlling the drug trade in the Green Lanes area of London among others, trying to obliterate other groups doing the same thing in the same area, killing members of the Kurdish community who refuse to "donate" to the PKK etc. Likewise the reference to prostitution/sex slavery does not refer to PKK members actually being prostitutes, but rather being involved in the trafficking of other women into the UK into forced prostitution.

Of course, the point about such activity being bourgeois is that, even if it's originally set up with "honest" intentions, the activity involves the reproduction of capitalist relations and the domination of humans by the profit motive, and the activity quickly becomes an end in itself. People may get involved in it for various reasons, but it's not something to be glorified, and certainly has nothing to do with building a communist movement.