Workers' Liberty

Afghanistan: the "revolution" that never was

Engin now focuses tightly on Afghanistan, and applies the things she has culled from Lenin:

"The PDPA had slogans which guaranteed the support of the discontented peasants."

Did they? They thought they did, but in fact, they did not. Nothing like it. Or, if the emphasis is on discontented peasants, then self-evidently, not enough peasants were discontented.

And there is a qualitative, fundamental, difference between being discontented and being revolutionary. The most striking and revealing features of post-Saur Afghanistan was that they could not, even from the heights of state power, organise the putative beneficiaries to support the land redistribution decrees promulgated in Kabul.

It was the measure of their isolation, of their utter failure and of the abortive character of their "revolution".

It is simply preposterous to write in 1982, when the whole sorry story is already history, that the PDPA had slogans which guaranteed the support of the peasants!

The point is that whereas the Bolsheviks acted when mass peasant revolutionary activity was already a fact, and when the peasants had had a chance to learn that only the working class in power would give them the land they wanted, in Afghanistan it was all speculation and gambling on the future, and on slogans that should have "guaranteed" peasant support, but didn't.

But then, though Khalq had more contact with the countryside than Parcham, their relationship to the rural people was a gruesome series of tragicomic episodes. It almost beggars belief that they outlawed usury in the villages when they had no alternative credit system in place, but they did, with the result that in 1979 agricultural production fell catastrophically.

It was episodes like this that made me write in "Afghanistan…" of the Afghan Stalinists in power, that their rule was a caricature and epitome of the whole grim and tragic history of Stalinism.

To say that "from the social-psychological point of view", or from any point of view at all, the PDPA had the support of "a majority in the country", is delirious nonsense. In terms of the known facts, it is the plain opposite of the truth. Engin works herself into it by way of intricately convoluted reasoning and the redefinition of terms, but the result is not at all different from flat, outright, deliberate lying. (The difference may be that she is in the first place lying to herself.)

Foolish lying, from her own point of view as champion and apologist for Khalq, because if the picture she paints is true, or even partly true, then it becomes impossible to account for what happened after April 1978. Implicitly it condemns the Khalqis: for if in April 1978 they had the support of the majority in the country, how did they come to lose it so soon and so spectacularly? How did they come to make such a blood-drenched catastrophe of things?

But, in fact, it is utterly untrue to say they had the support of the country at any point.

Blaming Parcham

The best Engin can do in her book to answer these questions implied in her account is to blame on Parcham the fact that it was only at the end of the year 1978 that the PDPA government got down to land reform. Previously, she says, they had either been restrained by the cautious, "reformist", Parcham or, after they broke with Parcham, were too busy repressing them. This delay gave the counter-revolutionaries the advantage.

In fact the explanation won't hold water. Within a couple of months they had thrown out Parcham and jailed or exiled its leaders.

One of the things that happens in real revolutions is that the prospect of land reform is a powerful weapon - worth many armies, able to dissolve hostile peasant armies - against the counter-revolution. It melts away mass support for the counter revolution.

In this case, it plainly did not. Why not? Because the ground had not at all been prepared. Because, lacking rural support, the regime had only brute, naked force, and used it savagely from the beginning. Because the government did not inspire confidence in those it tried to rouse against their traditional rulers and exploiters.

Such things as abolishing usury when the peasants could not do without credit and the government could provide no replacement for what it abolished, will have made the "infidel" government seem like wrecking busybodies to the peasants, not liberators bearing a viable alternative way of life.

Just as now, working to convert people to socialism, we meet our single greatest difficulty in getting people to make the mental leap that will let them imagine as feasible what we urge them to fight to win, so, but very much more so, with the Afghan peasants.

Peasants were reported refusing to take confiscated land, because that was contrary to Islam. But if they could have been inspired with faith in a different way of life, with confidence that the Kabul government knew what it was doing and could protect them from the vengeance of their traditional rulers, then most of them would, as people do, have found ways of squaring their religious conscience with doing what was most to their own advantage.

"Technical ability and thousands of armed soldiers which would enable the seizure of various centres." That is the only thing that mattered to the PDPA. They thought it was the only thing that mattered in making their revolution.

It did prove sufficient for the taking of power in Kabul. The difference between Saur and October, however, is shown clearly when we ask: who acted in Russia and who acted in Afghanistan?

In Russia, the workers' militia, backed by soldiers who had thrown off military discipline, seized power; in Afghanistan, power was seized by sections of the army and airforce, in which the soldiers acted under the hierarchical military discipline of their appointed officers… There is no comparison.

To the repeated question Engin puts, "Was October a coup?" the answer plainly is, no, but Afghanistan's "Saur Revolution" most certainly was. The difference can be seen plainly in Lenin's text, which Engin invoked, only to travesty it.

Emine Engin:

"Once the conditions for an uprising have appeared, the rest is a matter of art. This is one point on which the question of coup or revolution has been confused. In regard to the art aspect of the uprising, the Khalq organisation and its sympathisers within the army were chosen as the striking force…

"[Khalq] drew up a definite policy taking into account the mood of the masses, the position of its enemies and lukewarm friends, etc. The revolutionary army which it formed within the army was loyal to this policy. In this respect, the revolution in Afghanistan was not a revolutionary explosion of a type which created its subjective factor in revolutionary soldiers within the army.

"The revolutionaries in the army did not fill a vacuum in the political sphere; rather they formed a revolutionary army under the political leadership of the PDPA, they performed a military function."

Yes, but in terms of making, consolidating and implementing the "revolution", that was everything - all there was.

What the "special relationship" of the PDPA and the coup-makers added to the military seizure of power was a social programme which required the consent and active support of millions of people but which the PDPA Stalinists thought could be enforced from above by military brute force - and by an army that was a traditional, hierarchical formation and apart from key officers was in no sense a subjectively revolutionary army.

The type of army it was, was the measure of the revolution, and of the revolutionaries!

"When the revolution was announced over the radio hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets all over Afghanistan. The Trotskyists have seized on this notwithstanding the fact that, although the Bolsheviks too were in the majority before the October Revolution, the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia learned of the revolution via the telegraph or over the radio where there was one!"

Democracy

Typically, she uses a general truth to obscure the concrete reality.

"To understand revolution as something in which the absolute majority of the people, organised in regular armies, strikes as one, would be nothing but the other side of a parliamentarian understanding replacing the number of votes by a head count."

The October Revolution, which was the culmination of revolutionary ferment, and the Bolshevik seizures of power, backed by the soviets, are here assimilated to a military coup with no support outside the bigger cities!

Here concern for democracy and for what Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto called winning "the battle for democracy" is equated with narrow bourgeois parliamentarianism.

Revolutionary - and minority - direct action is counterposed not only to parliamentarianism but to democracy in general, and specifically to the workers' democracy and workers' councils of the October Revolution. It is not clear why this should not apply everywhere, or that she does not intend it to. Engin is a Stalinist.

The Leninist thought as she did. Their commitment to the Workers' Voice account of Afghanistan's "revolution" implied a programme for every country, including Britain. And for Stalinist Russia and Eastern Europe too. Thus, throughout the 1980s, The Leninist worried obsessively about the danger of "democratic counter-revolution" there, meaning - they said it plainly - that the people would overthrow Stalinist rule.

To equate the participation of the mass of the people in a revolution with passive electoralism, as Engin does, is to show that even your opposition to parliament-worship is misconceived.

We, following Lenin, counterpose mass action to parliamentarianism, not action by an elite minority, still less by segments of the regular army!

Engin now tries to square the circle. Khalq had mass support before April and then somehow lost it? That's the nature of revolution she explains: revolution generates counter-revolution.

"Coming to the operations of counter-revolutionary forces after the revolution, to expect anything else would again reflect a bourgeois parliamentarist understanding or the same understanding turned inside out.

"Revolution is a most intense, furious, desperate class struggle and civil war. Not a single great revolution in history has taken place without civil war."

A civil war in which a segment of the old state machine, under the command (not political leadership) of "revolutionaries", slugs it out with most of the population, is nothing to worry about? No, because in Engin's conception of revolution, the mass of the people have no irreplaceable role. At best they are a stage army. They are an optional extra. The Party can substitute for them. And in Afghanistan a segment of the state forces can, in seizing power, substitute for the Party.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

* Footnote: And indeed of all those who try to identify and distil the magic ingredient that made particular Stalinist revolutions possible, most notably that of the Castroites, whose would-be emulators saw minority guerilla warfare as the magic-working thing.