[Militant No. 491, 22nd February 1980, p. 11]
In this, the second part of a two-part article, Lynn Walsh explains why ‘Militant’, which condemned the Russian intervention, does not call for their withdrawal now.
Although US imperialism will not intervene directly in Afghanistan at this stage, they are already stepping up military aid to General Zia’s regime in Pakistan. Through Pakistan, and even through the Chinese leadership, the US will be encouraging and arming the rebel insurgents against the proletarian Bonapartist regime in Kabul.
Whatever their immediate motives, whether tribal, nationalist, or religious, their success against the Kabul regime would inevitably mean a victory for reaction, with the restoration of landlordism and capitalism in Afghanistan.
Recent press reports – now that the attempt to paint exaggerated pictures of mass insurgency has largely been dropped – show that many of the rebels are little more than bandits who are mainly out for loot. In any case, because of the country’s rugged terrain and the absence historically of a strongly centralised state, past regimes in Kabul have never had complete control of the whole country.
Any regime basing itself on the restoration of private property relations would inevitably be a satellite of US imperialism, and could only maintain its rule through a new and more oppressive form of totalitarian dictatorship.
Any idea that US imperialism is concerned about the rights of Afghanistan’s minority nationalities or the material well-being of the country’s peasants and tribesmen is absurd. Throughout the ex-colonial world the US has propped up a succession of barbarous dictatorships based on the suppression and exploitation of their peoples. One need look no further than Zia in Pakistan, or the Shah’s former regime in Iran.
In Pakistan, the US armed Zia in his military campaign to suppress the movement of the Baluchis – when they were fighting for national autonomy in recent years.
Having committed themselves to consolidating the Karmal regime, the Russian bureaucracy clearly has no intention of pulling out, and the sanctions being used by imperialism, some of them merely token sanctions, will not compel them to withdraw.
But the Russian leadership’s involvement in Afghanistan will not be like US imperialism’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam, as some capitalist commentators have tried to argue.
In Vietnam, the US based itself on a rotting ruling class of landlords and capitalists, who maintained their class rule through corrupt puppet dictatorships. They faced a mass movement of opposition, based on the social and national demands of the peasantry. This made the Vietnam war unwinnable for America, and the movement against the war at home forced imperialism to withdraw.
In Afghanistan, though it has moved to prop up a Bonapartist regime that rules through dictatorial methods, the Russian bureaucracy is defending new, fundamentally progressive social relations.
The land reforms in particular, the introduction of economic planning, and other progressive reforms, will create more and more of a mass basis of support for the regime.
Even now the Russian forces are adopting a ‘low profile’, attempting as far as possible to work through Afghan forces. In any case, most of the Russian troops are drawn from the Turkoman peoples close to the peoples of Afghanistan.
The Soviet bureaucracy has also put pressure on the Karmal leadership in Kabul to attempt to reach a compromise with sections of the mullahs, particularly by moderating their opposition to religious institutions and practices, and treading more slowly and cautiously as far as other reforms are concerned, particularly the education and emancipation of women.
When the proletarian Bonapartist regime is consolidated in Afghanistan, which will be within a measurable period, the Russian leadership will probably withdraw its forces. But in any case, if there were no danger of counter-revolutionary forces threatening the regime and the social changes that have been carried through, we would then call for the withdrawal of Soviet forces – as we have long called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Europe.
Marxists, however, cannot accept the new regime in Afghanistan as ‘socialist’. Because of the isolation of the social changes in an economically and culturally backward country, and the fact that the Bonapartist leadership has inevitably taken Russia’s Stalinist regime as its model. It is a grotesque totalitarian caricature of a socialist state.
Political revolution needed
Marxists stand for a further supplementary political revolution to remove the bureaucratic caste that now rules on the basis of nationalised property relations, and to introduce socialist democracy based on the control of the workers and peasants through soviet-type organisations.
However, with a tiny working class, future developments in Afghanistan cannot be seen in isolation from the developments in Russia and Eastern Europe.
In Russia and the more economically developed societies of Eastern Europe, the bureaucracy has outlived any progressive role it played in the past through developing the planned economy.
Stalinism has entered a new period of crisis. New movements of the working class, like those in Hungary in 1956 and Poland more recently, when the workers rose against the military-police regimes and began to establish their own democratic forms of control of industry and the state are on the political agenda.
Clearly, political revolution in Russia and Eastern Europe, with the now highly developed working class taking control of the economy and the state into their own hands, would open up an entirely different, genuinely socialist, perspective of development for countries like Afghanistan.
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