Workers' Liberty

Introduction

In political and ideological terms, what is now the Weekly Worker group was always a satellite, a child-group, of the Workers' Voice (WV) faction of the Turkish Communist Party (KPT). All its ideas came from Workers' Voice.

In 1982 the KPT published a small book by Emine Engin on the Stalinist "revolution" in Afghanistan. Jack Conrad/John Bridge, who usually is a karaoke-Leninist - not a translator of Lenin into our conditions, but a frequently unintelligent transcriber of Lenin - is on Afghanistan a transcriber of the work of the Turkish Stalinist, Emine Engin. In the language of the music industry, John-Jack's work on Afghanistan is a "cover" version of Emine Engin - Karaoke Jack Sings Engin, so to speak!

Engin's is not an "objective" scientific work, still less Marxist work. It is a Party-lawyer's polemic written to sustain the position on Afghanistan taken up by the WV organisation.

WV championed the Khalq segment of the PDP. They saw a parallel between their own "Leninist", revolutionary section of the KPT and Khalq on one side, and on the other an identity between the "reformist" "Menshevik" Parchamis and their own opponents in the KPD.

They argued that, though the Russian invaders had secured "the Afghan revolution", they had simultaneously acted in a reactionary way in killing Khalq leader Hafizullah Amin "and 97 Khalq leaders", and in breaking up the Khalq as soon as they got control of Kabul.

This sort of self-contradictory, oxymoronic, pseudo-dialectical sophistic politics is one of the characteristics which The Leninist and the Weekly Worker group learned from Workers' Voice.

It makes sense first to discuss Engin's work, which is also the more comprehensive, and, after its fashion, more serious, and then to come back to discuss her understudy, J-J.

What is most notably absent in Engin (as in J-J) is a materialist-Marxist class analysis of the April 1978 Stalinist-army coup. She insists that it was not a coup but a real albeit disguised popular revolution. Moreover, it was a working class revolution which established the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Afghanistan.

As far as I know, the KPT and its British offshoot were the only people in the whole world to argue that what happened in Afghanistan in April 1978 was not a coup d'état. On the facts, it was absurd, but it became their factional badge of honour.

In Emine Engin, historical analogies and word-juggling with contrived and specious definitions take the place of a Marxist class analysis.

In Engin's account, the place that should be occupied by an analysis of the classes in Afghan society is filled by the "substitutionist" assertion that the Stalinist party, the Khalq faction of the PDPA, embodied working class, communist, politics and was therefore the Afghan working class in action.

In Engin, as in J-J, "The Party" is for purposes of analysis, the working class. The composition of the PDPA may not have been working class, but to dwell on such sociological detail would be "economistic".

"The Party" can act for the working class, and when it acts, even if it is the army officers and the soldiers under their command who in fact act, it is nonetheless the working class - not only the Afghan working class, but the international working class - that acts.

This is an extreme form, indeed a mystical form, of "substitutionism" - of substituting some other social group or party for the working class. In fact, it is a double dose of substitutionism. For not only does she have the PDPA, which sociologically is not working class, substitute for the working class, but in "making the revolution" sections of the officer corps, using the apolitical soldiers under their orders, substitutes for the party, whose political guidance the officers accept.*

Without keeping this in mind, it will be impossible to make sense of Engin on her own terms, or of J-J.

No less remarkable than the absence of class analysis in her work - as in John-Jack's - is the absence of an account of the impact on Afghan society of the 25 years symbiosis of sections of the Afghan urban elite with the USSR's Stalinist ruling class.

Nothing in this story makes sense without that. But Engin presents the remarkable success of the PDPA in recruiting army and airforce officers as if it were just an especially successful variant of normal "communist" subversion work in the armed forces, and had nothing to do with the USSR's impact on sections of Afghanistan's urban elite. Engin - and in her tracks J-J - deliberately falsifies the facts. She suppresses the fact that it was amongst the officers that the PDPA recruited.

Her starting point may well have been the idea that since the PDPA succeeded in making a revolution, its "methods" had passed the test of practice and experience and deserved to be studied by revolutionaries like herself. She wrote:

"By succeeding in carrying out a revolution, the PDPA succeeded in passing a test."

But for that to produce anything useful, she would have to honestly analyse the Saur revolution. That is not at all what she does!

It suits Engin's purpose to conflate and confuse the unique "army work" of the PDPA with the normal sort of work to undermine and subvert the armed forces which the Communist International once set out as an essential defining characteristic of a communist party, and to pretend that others - the KPT - might take the Khalqis as a model and emulate their work in the armed forces.

But no one could at will fix it for the Turkish, or any other army and airforce, to have the relations with the USSR which the Afghan military had had for 25 years before April 1978. The PDPA experience was therefore no use at all as a model for what the KPT could hope to do. Engin, ignoring the central aspects of that experience, produced work on Afghanistan that was only the spinning of a "revolutionary" fairy tale, not a guide to action for the KPT and others.

When the Lenin-Trotsky Comintern laid it down that work in the armed forces should be done and made that a condition for affiliation to the International, they had in mind work with rank and file soldiers. To sustain her thesis, Engin must suppress and deny the fact. The PDPA recruited mainly officers. So she is mendaciously vague and unclear about what segment - the officers - of the Afghan forces the PDPA recruited from.

Her account of the history of the PDPA before the Saur coup is entirely the Khalq faction's account of it. And as she tells her story, she excuses Khalq for that for which she, following the post-coup Khalq line on PDP history, castigates the Parchamis. For example, she excuses and explains away Khalq's offer to do what Parcham did after Mohammed Daud's coup in 1973, and join the government.

She uses vague terms to avoid saying that that is what Khalq did: "In the face of the left-sounding promises of the government, the Khalq came forward initially with the proposal for a united front". No, Khalq offered to join Daud's government. That it did not do that was determined not by Khalq but by Daud's and Parcham's refusal to have them. John-Jack will do exactly the same thing as Engin.

She does her best to damn Parcham in every way possible, calling them reformists, quoting the Khalq leader Amin that they were just "aristocratic kids", etc. And yet she plays down the fact that Parcham in government after 1973 helped persecute - jail, torture and kill - its factional opponents in Khalq, though it did, and the history of that must be a major part of the explanation of why the two groups began to tear each other apart immediately after the Saur coup, when Khalq persecuted Parcham. Why does she do that?

The Khalq-Parcham "unification" in preparation for the coup was most likely a shotgun wedding at the behest of the Russians (it is, given the history and what followed after the coup, scarcely to be explained unless you assume this) and she wants to present a picture of an entirely autonomous seizure of power by the PDPA, or rather by Khalq. By suppressing the full extent of what she could not but see as Parcham's crimes against Khalq, she avoided having to face awkward questions about how these two bitterly hostile groups managed to "unite" in July 1977. She avoids the probable "Russian dimension" in the preparations for the April 1978 coup, of which Khalq-Parcham's "unification" was one…

She presents Parcham as the Afghan Mensheviks and the Khalq as the Bolsheviks - and then proceeds to substitute considerations about the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and about Russian conditions, for analysis of her subject, Afghanistan.

She conflates Russia's October Revolution with Afghanistan's Saur coup, Afghanistan with Russia and Russia with Afghanistan so that she sees October as essentially no different from Saur, thus grossly diminishing the greatest event in working class history!

She makes foolish ultra-left sectarian judgements, mechanically reading the line of the KPT onto Afghanistan. Castigating Parcham's reformism, she writes: Parcham "defended some of the reforms which had been put into effect by the monarchy in 1964 (reforms which are implemented by reactionary establishments or forces, and which provide progress via the evolutionary path of reaction, can absolutely not be supported)."

Certainly you do not express confidence in such forces or disarm politically before them or fail to criticise the shortcomings of their reforms. But you should "oppose" such things as the creation of an elected parliament by the King, after 1963? (In fact the PDPA, both segments, took part in the ensuing elections, winning four seats…)

In this way, suppressing information and discussion of the real classes involved, eliding from her story the pivotal symbiosis of sections of the Afghan elite with the USSR's bureaucratic ruling class, and, when she comes to it, suppressing the relevant information about exactly which military men the PDPA recruited, Engin discusses a largely imaginary Afghanistan ; not the April 1978 coup but an ideal model revolution.

We will now go on to examine in some detail Emine Engin's account of the "Afghanistan Revolution", and her attempt to conflate the Saur coup and the October proletarian revolution.

Substitutionism warps Emine Engin's analysis

Her substitutionist idea of the revolutionary party and its relationship to the working class is very clearly expressed: she reports that on the foundation of the PDPA, "it was announced that the party was 'the party of the working class armed with the ideology of the working class'."

She does not discuss the PDPA's class composition; she takes for granted that the ideas which this Stalinist formation embodied - most of them hers too - were working class ideas, and that ideas were sufficient.

She is not a historical materialist but a flagrant historical idealist!

In fact, their ideas were the dominant ideas of the ruling class in the USSR and its Afghan understudies, who aspired to the same position in Afghanistan.

She goes on: "However, any party founded as the (sic) party of the working class in a country like Afghanistan could not be expected to be a fully working class party." Here she is about to discuss the actual Afghan working class and this party's relations with the Afghan workers? The class composition of the PDPA? No, she is talking entirely about the political line of the party! The PDPA "could not be a fully working class party, without a struggle and splits among various tendencies showing themselves immediately".

Both Parcham and Khalq were closely linked with the USSR and with its secret police, though Parcham was the closer, tending to be more in line with what Russia wanted done in Afghanistan and more compliant with Russia's policies. There is a dimension of Afghan state assertiveness, and of Pashtun nationalism, against the Russians in the Khalqis' greater independence from Russia after the April '78 coup. During the 10-year split, neither group was ever repudiated by the USSR.

Explaining the formation of the political mind of the Khalq leadership, Engin cites as a major factor their determination "not to forget the lessons of experiences such as those in the Sudan, in Egypt and India", in the period when Stalinist formations were docile, sometimes suicidally docile, towards USSR-approved third world governments. She ignores entirely the fact that this was part of a generally aggressive "left" turn by the Kremlin in the aftermath of the mid-70s defeat of the USA in Indochina.

Instead, she uses Stalinist doubletalk: Khalq learned that "in general, the national bourgeoisie is terribly frightened of the complete democratisation of the social and political system and of radical revolutionary change in the system".

She uses words that for her have a special meaning the opposite of their common meaning. "Democratisation" here means? Democratisation in the same sense that the PDPA was a working class party. It has nothing to do with democratisation as socialists aspire to it. It is the extreme opposite of what we understand by democracy. In Engin's usage, the savage terroristic dictatorship of Khalq was exemplary democracy! "Democratic" here is another name for the Stalinist assumption of power, rule by the PDPA.

Work with the officers or with the rank and file soldiers?

She valiantly tries to square what happened in Afghanistan with her "Marxism-Leninism": Khalq "did not reject the general principles of Marxism in regard to the army. These [?] general principles were stated… but it was emphasised that in Afghanistan these general principles would be put into practice in a somewhat different order."

The principles of Marxist revolution in regard to the state is that the working class breaks it up and replaces it by working class rule. Nothing like that was attempted in Afghanistan, unless you think the purging of the armed forces that Khalq undertook to make itself sole master of the state (purging Parchamis too), amounted to the same thing. Engin, of course, does think that.

She continues: "In general, as the class struggle develops, the army is used as a means of suppressing the revolutionary forces; but as the class struggle develops further, it inevitably splits the army. Party work within the army is always necessary. Taking the social structure of Afghanistan into consideration, these general principles were put into practice, with emphasis right from the beginning on the party's work within the army. But the task of smashing the state apparatus was not rejected…. [Khalq leader] Taraki gave Amin the task of work in the army. Under the command of Amin, intensive ideological education was started within the main body of the army. At the same time the Khalq wing carried out practices of its own during official military manoeuvres…"

Because this is plainly the line according to Khalq, nothing can be taken at face value. She uses abstract formulations, like "splits in the army", to hide actualities.

The class struggle in Afghanistan, the class struggle in any conventional sense, did not split the army and the airforce. They split on commitment to or rejection of a model of economic development patterned on the USSR.

There was class struggle at the heart of it, but it was a class struggle within the Afghan ruling elite - those aspiring to be a ruling class on the model of the ruling bureaucracy in the USSR against the others.

Engin deliberately hides the fact that the "intensive ideological education work" of Amin in the army was directed at the officers, and that in consequence the PDPA recruited officers and not rank and file soldiers; and that, in contrast to the approach advocated by the Lenin-Trotsky Communist International, basing themselves on the experience of the Russian revolution, it aimed to take over and use the existing hierarchical armed forces and not to break them up.

Their methods were compatible only with such a goal. If there were any rank and file PDPA soldiers, they played no part in the coup except as members of the Afghan state's military formations, commanded by PDPA officers.

The army did split, but not horizontally, with the lower ranks separating from the officers, as in Russia in 1917. The army and airforce split vertically: sections of the army and airforce under its own hierarchical command split, according to the politics of the top officers, from sections similarly organised and mobilised on the other side.

Engin writes so as to avoid recording these facts and having to discuss them. She writes mendaciously, deliberately (it cannot be other than deliberate) giving a false impression that the Khalq's work in the army was other than what it was.

Yet the Afghan reality finds its way into her picture when she asserts that the "Khalq wing carried out practices of its own during official military manoeuvres…"

I have no idea whether that is true or not. But for it to be true, then key sections of the officers in charge of the official military exercises, all the way up to the top, would have had to be PDPA. That is the fact; and that is the point Emine tries to hide.

A maturing revolutionary situation?

Emine goes to great pains to present events before the April coup as constituting a "maturing" revolutionary situation, and to pretend that the coup proceeded in accordance with its development:

"The situation in the country was becoming tense. As activity among the masses increased, and as the PDPA stretched out to townships, villages and nomads' tents, the repressive nature of Daud's regime was becoming clearer. The revolutionary situation was maturing. In accordance with this, Amin began to turn education in the army into practical planning."

This too is falsification of facts and of relationships. She is, here as all through this work, careful to avoid specifying where exactly in the army Amin was doing his "education" work. (Curiously, the airforce, where Parcham was strong, is scarcely mentioned. Certainly the airforce seems to have suffered most from the PDPA's post-coup faction fighting and purging.)

Did the PDPA ever (except by way of death-dealing planes and helicopter gunships) "stretch out to townships, villages and nomad tents"? For sure, not to many of them!

It is perfectly true that there was a crisis in Afghan society, and that dictator Daud's failures helped create a willingness in formerly Daudist officers to throw in with the PDPA. That is a very important part of the picture. But she bases her case that Saur was a revolution and not a coup on the idea that the PDPA coup was prepared by mass struggle.

For evidence of conditions in Afghanistan, she goes to a retrospective account of pre-coup Afghanistan in the magazine used by the Russian Stalinist ruling class for communicating "the line" to its loyal parties across the world, Problems of Peace and Socialism (PPS). The version in English - one of no less than 35 languages in which it was published - was called World Marxist Review (WMR).

From the issue of January 1979, she quotes "comrade Zeray" of the PDPA describing the situation before April, 1978, and claiming that the PDPA had 50,000 members then. This flatly contradicts all other sources. On the eve of Saur the PDPA itself claimed 8,000, and the real figure may have been not much more than a quarter of that.

(J-J repeats this figure from WMR in Weekly Worker. That Engin, or John-Jack, 20 years ago, should quote WMR is not surprising; but it is astonishing that J-J is still doing it long after he has had a chance to realise that most of what he learned from those people was shameless lies.)

The April coup was "really a revolution"?

We now come to Emine Engin's account of why the coup was a revolution.

The PDPA was ready, she proudly reports. Taraki and Amin decided that in the event of their arrest "party members and sympathisers within the army [she consistently leaves out the airforce] should immediately launch an insurrection. Amin saw to it that various plans devised for this purpose were rehearsed ten times. These drills were skilfully concealed under the cover of general military manoeuvres. Among soldiers and officers [the order here, soldiers and officers, is deliberately mendacious] belonging to the party a list was prepared of those who would be commanders during the insurrection. The party's military chain of command was determined…" (J-J weaves his own fantasy of imaginary detail around this. See below.)

But is there reason to think that when the PDPA-led sections of the army and airforce moved into action on April 27th, 1978, there was any chain of command in operation other than the normal chain in military organisations structured and drilled to move under their officer leadership? Not that I know of.

The PDPA segments of the army and airforce acted as typically hierarchical military forces. One of the shaping characteristics of this "revolution" was the fact that though the military played the decisive role in taking and then fighting to hold and consolidate power, these state forces did not have any of the characteristics of a revolutionary army, with a politically conscious rank and file (see Afghanistan and the Shape of the 20th Century ("Afghanistan…") in Workers' Liberty 2/2).

And, once again, Engin's own account of what the PDPA officers could do under cover of official military manoeuvres, shows just how things stood. A sizeable, and as it proved, decisive segment of the Afghan state forces had fallen under the control of the PDPA by way of the political allegiance of their officers, not of the rank and file soldiers, and - if this is forgotten then the story is incomprehensible - of the Russians.

We have seen why Emine Engin is concerned to establish that 1978 was a revolution and not a coup - it serves them, they believe, to fight their factional war in the KPT.

That it was no ordinary coup, that the relationship between the Stalinist PDP and the military and airforce officers who, using the troops under their command, made the "revolution", makes it a coup unique in history (the only remotely comparable phenomena I know of are the Ba'th party's relationship with military coups in Iraq and Syria in the 1960s, and between these and Afghanistan there are important differences). That it had some support in the urban population - that is fact. But that it was a coup, a seizure of the state by part of the military, a "revolution" from above whose active protagonist was a section of the military - that also is fact. A coup sui generis, but a coup nonetheless. Most certainly, it was no sort of popular revolution.

But Afghanistan has become entangled with Turkish politics and WV's struggle against those it sees as Turkey's equivalent of Parcham.

Part 2.

* Footnote: Without the fiction that the ruling CPSU was the working class in politics, the WV analysis of the USSR would have led them inescapably to a State Capitalist position.