Workers' Liberty

Press fantasies

Militant's third major article on Afghanistan, published in July 1980, brutally ties all this together. Its author was Alan Woods. Like Walsh, Woods is one of those who gathered around the dead stump of the old ISFI (Pablo-Mandel) British group in the early 60s and helped developed the mutant strain that is the present Militant tendency.

Grant established some account of the April 1978 "revolution"; and Walsh (perhaps after an internal dispute, but it scarcely matters) established a (hypocritically dressed-up) pro-invasion line from Grant's unresolved contradictions. Woods emerges as the arrogant champion of the civilising mission of the Army of the Russian bureaucracy, picking up (I should think consciously) the arguments of Fabian imperialism - all the way to the explicit paternalist depiction of the Afghan masses as necessarily the mere objects of someone else's boot and bayonet in history.

Entitled "Afghanistan: what is really happening? - the truth behind the press fantasies", Woods' article is a polemic against the press reports of mass resistance to the invaders. That aspect of it is not important. It is, indeed, ridiculous. For his case is that the Western press is grossly unreliable, and making anti-Russian propaganda on Afghanistan - and he establishes it entirely by quotations from the Western press!

The piece is studded by quotations from the Times.

In fact, of course, the bourgeois press has to be read carefully and watched. But what emerges from Woods' own rather silly polemics is that whereas an effort was being made in the Times and Financial Times to establish the facts, and this involved printing not entirely checkable accounts and then correcting them or repudiating them, what Woods himself does is take the comments of the Times on press inaccuracies and reports that proved false, one-sidedly seize on a series of their self-corrections, and belabour them in order to disguise his own partisan and one-sided propaganda for the civilising mission of the Russians.

Woods doesn't notice how ludicrous it is to end one point with, "And the Times reporter commented laconically: 'Not to put too fine a point on it, the Voice of America was talking rubbish'" - and then immediately go on: "But the Times itself has not been averse to talking rubbish in recent months, as when it screamed in banner headlines: Hundreds dead in Kabul revolt against Russians [28 February], a typically exaggerated report of the strike of reactionary shopkeepers in the Kabul bazaar in February…". Woods is clearly a master of the major tool of Grantite reasoning, the non sequitur. Or perhaps he means - it is certainly his underlying train of thought - that dead shopkeepers are not worth tallying.

Woods does not need to read the serious bourgeois press (the only source of information available to us, and for that matter the only or main source of world news available to Marx, pre-1917 Lenin, and post-1927 Trotsky). He knows what is going on, from Grantite theory. This is the core of the article - his assumptions and interpretations.

The point is not assessments like the following (which are basically the same as in Workers' Action): "Moscow's strategy is first to dig in in the towns, secure control of the administration and the main highways, and then gradually consolidate their influence over the villages and the backward-mountain tribes". Nor is it his support (despite the reiterated hypocrisy about how the Russians should not have gone in) for the Russians. It is his interpretation of what is happening and why.

"Dark masses"

For Woods, because "these tribesmen [are] 'dark masses', sunk in the gloom-of barbarism, whose conditions of life and psychology have not changed fundamentally in 2,000 years", that "the task: of dragging [sic] the Afghan countryside out of the slough of primeval backwardness and into the 20th century would be formidable, even with correct leadership and Marxist politics".

"The Russian bureaucracy and their Afghan supporters are, in effect, carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution in that country". In a "distorted, bureaucratic, bonapartist fashion", Woods of course adds. Still, that is what they are doing in Afghanistan and it is the totalitarian bureaucracy that is doing it. And therefore we should be glad that they are doing it.

This is a new version of "permanent revolution". In Trotsky's formula the proletariat took the lead of the peasant masses in the struggle against reaction and backwardness, carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, and in the same movement took power, eliminating the bourgeoisie. Woods' formula is one of "international bonapartist permanent revolution" in which the bureaucracy of the USSR is the protagonist and its instrument is an Army which has the task of subjugating, as a bitterly resented foreign invader, the rural masses. (And not only the rural masses. Woods asserts falsely that the towns are solidly with the invaders, but in fact one of the results of the invasion is the alienation of the masses in the towns and even of sections of the PDP (the Khalq faction)).

What will happen in this special case of the permanent revolution that Woods thinks is likely to unfold in Afghanistan?

A foreign military machine conquers the country; organises, beginning from an initially tiny basis of support, a replica of the totalitarian Russian political regime, carries out reforms from above, manipulating the population (for example land redistribution under such a regime is no more than a transitional stage to collectivisation, with or without consent). At the same time, unless the regime proves to be different in Afghanistan from what it is in Russia, it will oppress, massacre, and deport as many of the Afghans as necessary. The norm for this regime is that the population has no civil rights.

What has this got to do with permanent revolution? Nothing whatever! Here permanent revolution is only an - unintentionally - ironic phrase to point up the contrast between Trotsky's programme and what is likely to happen in Afghanistan.

Woods rightly locates the pre-invasion dynamic in the backwardness of the country and the self-defined mission of the officer caste to- modernise in face of the feebleness of Afghan capitalism and its bourgeoisie. He accepts that the PDP/officer caste symbiosis was only possible on a programme of transforming that caste and associated sections of the middle class into a ruling elite of the Russian bureaucratic type. The "revolution" was nevertheless "a step forward in comparison to the previous situation", But the point is that it proved impossible for the PDP and the army to make that "step", and that for Trotskyists to support such a formation, rooted in the existing state and pitted against the masses is a programmatic betrayal. It was quite distinct from the sort of movement that existed in Vietnam and China, where Stalinist forces led masses against reaction and imperialism.

Woods tells us that the attitude to the invasion is not determined by sentimental considerations but "first and foremost [!] by class consideration". Which class forces stand behind the present Kabul regime, and which behind the Mujaheddin rebels?

Woods puts his shoulder and full weight to an open door by proving that the rich stand behind the rebels

Progressive Stalinism

The rebels have next to nothing in the towns, says Woods triumphantly. "The new regime can count on the support of the small working class that exists, plus the great majority of the students, intellectuals and functionaries". Woods does not present his evidence for thinking that this is how it actually is. He knows that it is so, for it is ordained in the schema that it is so. "The struggle in Afghanistan is essentially a struggle of the towns against the countryside [which was true before the invasion], of civilisation against barbarism, of the new against the old". Stalinism is the progressive next stage, the bearer of civilisation.

Citing facts about the rebels burning schools, Woods declares that the victory of these "reactionary gangsters" "would lead to a terrible bloodbath and an orgy of violence and destruction which would plunge Afghanistan back into the dark ages". He lists the traditional cruelties and mutilations used by the rebels; he is completely silent about the napalm and the Russian tanks and bombers. The historical mission of the rebels is "about as progressive as that of Genghis Khan" - unlike the mission of the Army of the Russian totalitarian bureaucracy.

And no starry-eyed enthusiast for the conquering armies of capitalism was ever so "optimistic" as Alan Woods. After the brutal disregard comes the consoling cant: the future - after the invading army has completed the subjugation, buried the dead, and re-built the bombed villages - is bright and hopeful. "As the social benefits of the revolution [the conquest] begin to become understood by the poor peasants… the mass base for reaction will evaporate…." Moscow will eventually withdraw "the bulk" of its troops (and of course Militant will approve their judgment and wait for it). "Despite all the totalitarian deformations[!] the new regime will mark a big step forward for Afghan society. Industry will be built up rapidly… The growth of an industrial proletariat in Afghanistan will ultimately serve to undermine the base of bureaucratic rule and prepare the way for a new political revolution, and the establishment of a healthy workers' democracy in Afghanistan".

Conclusion

Militant's whole argument on Stalinism and Afghanistan is dependent on an unstated analogy with the attitude Marxists took to early capitalism.

In 19th century Europe capitalism developed industry, cleared away feudal restrictions, and also developed the working class. Marx and Engels argued for a recognition of the progressive role of capitalism, and an alliance between the working class and the middle-class revolutionaries.

Stalinism today in some backward countries - so Militant's argument runs - develops industry, develops the working class, clears away feudal remnants. So why not "critically" support the Stalinists' efforts to "drag Afghanistan into the 20th century"?

Why not? In the first place, Marx and Engels also argued for independent anti-capitalist activity by the working class at every stage. Lenin developed this emphasis with great sharpness in relation to capitalist development in Russia, denouncing the Mensheviks' passive, self-limiting policy of accepting that the bourgeoisie was preordained to lead all and any general revolutionary movements for the foreseeable future.

There is nothing similar in Militant's policy. Nothing the Mensheviks did comes near to equalling the fatalistic prostration of Militant before the Afghan Stalinists and the Russian Stalinists in Afghanistan.

Even the worst of the Mensheviks tried to organise workers independently for their immediate interests. Militant accepts that such workers' organisations are impossible under Stalinist rule. It deplores the fact, but accepts it as an inevitable feature of a whole stage of development in which the active force, deserving of support for its progressive work, is the Stalinist bureaucracy.

At the end of that stage Militant sees the political revolution. But no practical conclusions follow for now.

Although Militant gives an accurate description of who dominates now in Afghanistan, of what the motives for the Russian invasion were, and although they describe the bureaucracy as totalitarian, at no point do they draw any conclusion about the oppressive, anti working class character of the regime that the Russians will create. They know there will be "totalitarian-deformations" but that is not important, it is a secondary aspect of a fundamentally progressive phenomenon.

Trotskyists say that the bureaucracy can be (and has been) in certain circumstances revolutionary against the bourgeoisie, treating it (as Trotsky expressed it) as a competitor for the surplus product. It is in all circumstances counter-revolutionary against the working class. Militant, which might accept this formula, adds however - even so, it is also progressive in backward countries.

Militant completely identifies with the transformation it projects. It portrays the fact that the Russians will probably be able to create a stable regime as reason for hope in the circumstances. It assumes, takes for granted, that the workers will support the transformation, and blandly sets aside the fact that this means co-option of individuals into the new bureaucracy and repression for the masses.

A false analogy

In any case, the historical perspective is wrong. The presentation of Stalinism as a progressive historical force analogous to early capitalism is fundamentally false - and moreover it undermines, as we shall see, the ritually-proclaimed perspective of political revolution.

It is the relationship of Stalinist regimes to the working class that makes the analogy with developing early capitalism completely untenable.

Under the regime of Stalinist totalitarianism the working class is bound hand and foot, deprived of all rights by a highly conscious and militantly anti working class state apparatus which concentrates the means of production in its own hands - together with immense powers of oppression and terror.

It was possible, within developing capitalism, for Marxists to look to a progressive capitalist evolution and still to relate to the working class, support its struggles, and try to organise it independently: The prospect was not that if the bourgeoisie established their regime, then the working class would be held in a totalitarian vice. On the contrary, even in the worst and most repressive early capitalist hell-holes the working class retained individual rights and could take advantage of loopholes to organise itself.

Bourgeois society offered the possibility of the workers organising themselves and developing politically and culturally. This did not happen without struggle, repression, and setbacks - but it was not ruled out, it could happen and it did happen. And otherwise the Marxist policy would have been a nonsense.

A specific, repressive, and terribly reactionary regime is inseparable from Stalinism. Economic development was separable from the often repressive early capitalist regimes because the exploitation of the working class did not rest on its legal status but on economic (market) transactions and the bourgeois ownership of the means of production. Stalinist economic development is inseparable from totalitarian oppression of the working class; the-economics are not separable from the regime, and to opt for one is necessary to opt for both. The surplus product is not seized primarily via market transactions, but via the winepress grip of the bureaucracy. For this reason, the analogy with the capitalist development of the means of production is a piece of monstrous Stalinist nonsense.

Defence of USSR

But surely Militant's approach is implied in the idea that the Stalinist states should be defended against imperialism? Not so. That is fundamentally a position against imperialism, against according it any progressive role, against looking to anyone but the working class to deal with the bureaucracy, against allowing imperialism once again to feed off the areas taken out of its control in the USSR and later the other Stalinist states.

The remnants of the conquests of October are defended against imperialism despite the monstrous totalitarianism that is grafted onto them.

Already in 1939-40, Trotsky and his comrades declared, "We were and remain against the seizure of new territories by the Kremlin." (They took sides with Russia against Finland because Finland was then an outpost of Anglo French imperialism; they did not evaluate an expansion of Russian control as progressive. On the contrary, Trotsky spoke of the fate of the people of former Eastern Poland as becoming the "semi-slaves" of Stalin. The historically progressive elements were massively overlaid by the reactionary anti working class regime. The experience since then has reinforced this attitude one hundredfold: in an advanced capitalist country like Czechoslovakia with a mass labour movement and a mass Communist Party (a real party, not a ruling apparatus), Russian control meant the annihilation of the labour-movement.

Trotsky's view, in fact, was that the property relations were potentially progressive; imperialism should not be allowed to destroy-that progressive potential, but working class revolution was necessary to realise the potential. "In order that nationalised property in the occupied areas, as well as in the USSR, become a basis for genuinely progressive, that is to say socialist development, it is necessary to overthrow the Moscow bureaucracy" (Trotsky). The USSR "as a whole" - property relations plus bureaucratic tyranny - was a reactionary force.

To advocate the expansion of that system is an explicitly pro-Stalinist position.

Of course, we supported the Vietnamese, for example, against imperialism, despite the Stalinist leadership: In the case of Afghanistan, there is nothing to support but a Stalinist leadership and the brutal extension of Kremlin power.

To say that the overthrow of already established nationalised property by imperialist intervention is reactionary and should be resisted is one thing. It is another to support the Russian bureaucracy against the people of an invaded country. We say to imperialism: hands off Afghanistan. We can't, or we should not, say that to the people of Afghanistan.

To slip from the view that Stalinist collectivism contains progressive or potentially progressive elements compared to imperialism or imperialist-backed alternatives, into the view that the Stalinist regime is progressive apart from the working class, while atomising and oppressing the working class and plebeian population, is to accept the bureaucracy as the protagonist of history - for now or for "the next stage". It is a reactionary and elitist position. No wonder Woods finds himself speaking of the dark masses of Afghanistan.

If we-assume that no conscious or subconscious racism is involved here (and I do assume that), we are left with a choice example of Militant's insensitivity, and with a naked expression of truly Fabian contempt and disdain, licenced by paternalism, towards the people of Afghanistan. The brutal expansion of Russian Stalinism is looked to to sort them out rather than the brutal expansion of British imperialism. But it is the same spirit, the same tone, even the same image - complete with self-aware quote marks for the people who are mere objects of history and of someone else's drive to conquer and perhaps industrialise them.

The broad sweep

But, in the broad sweep of history, is it not true that the development of industry lays the basis for progress? In the broad sweep, yes - on condition that the working class liberates itself and seizes the control of the means of production from the hands of the bureaucracy. But politics is necessarily concerned with a more immediate focus, a sharper focus. In that focus the idea that the oppression and slaughter, deportation, etc, which has been the stock-in-trade of the Stalinist bureaucracy ruling the USSR, is a detail in the broad sweep of history, is a monstrous anti-Trotskyist nonsense. It loses the viewpoint of the militant who stand with the working class and with oppressed peoples, trying to, organise them to-make themselves the subjects of history not its passive objects. in favour of the viewpoint of the historian "prophet", the man in the ivory tower. An entirely different set of values, priorities, concerns and considerations belong to the militants compared to the philosophers in the watch towers. Of course Marxist militants inform their work with general historical consideration. The do not allow them to override their mobilising, organising, and rousing up of the oppressed. They do not allow the goal of industrial development on the back of the masses to supplant the goal Trotsky outlines in the quotation at the head of this article*.

In the Grantite view of Afghanistan everything is eventually and quickly to be made right by the workers taking political power from the bureaucracy in Russia and elsewhere. Such a view is rational only on an analysis of Stalinism such as Trotsky's, which identifies the bureaucracy as being in fundamental contradiction with the basic socialised relations of production. (In the final analysis, that is because it is in fundamental contradiction with the working class). Grant presents a different picture: the bureaucracy (the Russian one of its would-be Afghan duplicate) is the bearer of a higher civilisation and will do for Afghanistan what capitalism did for Europe. That bureaucracy is at one, at least for a whole historical period, with the collectivised means of production, which for that epoch of history are its means of production.

The implication is inescapable that Stalinism, which has a progressive role in the backward countries, has had a progressive role in Russia too. We have been through, and are still in, an epoch of progressive Stalinism. And it follows that the Stalinist states are stable class societies, whose ruling group is not a usurping bureaucracy in contradiction to the property relations but a historically legitimate ruling class, whose role in history is to develop the forces of production. Grant, in fact, like Isaac Deutscher, is a Shachtmanite (bureaucratic collectivist) disguised within the verbiage of Trotsky's theory, and placing a plus sign of appreciation against the new class society between capitalism and socialism while Shachtman placed a minus sign, calling it barbarism.

In that perspective, it is not clear why the working class political revolution against Stalinism in Russia should be on the order of the day now, or even on the agenda of the next epoch at all.

Bloodbath

Finally, all arguments and details aside, there is the fall-back argument: if the Russians go, there will be a bloodbath. If the Russians stay there will be [and there is] a bloodbath. The argument is in fact thoroughly dishonest. It is also incomplete. The complete version would say, and not just imply - a bloodbath of PDP people and collaborators with the Russians.

Militant is not raising a humanitarian objection, but taking sides with the Russian army and its supporters. It is a variant of the idea that it is better if the Russians do what the PDP/Army aspirant bureaucrats could not do - subjugate the population and make a Stalinist revolution.

The first question to the hypocritical "humanitarians" is, how many of the Afghans will the Russians shoot? The second question is, why is such a brutal transformation by conquest necessary? Why should it not be what the majority of the peoples of Afghanistan want that occurs? Why can't this area wait until the majority of its own population decides to fight for social change, or until a socialist revolution in the advanced world makes it possible to attract its people to the work of transforming their own country? From the point of view of the international socialist revolution, there is no reason why not.

Fundamentally, however, it is impossible to work out a serious independent working class political assessment on the basis of yes or no to such gun-to-head questions as: do you want the right-wing Muslim reactionaries to triumph? (In Militant's case, anyway, the question is an afterthought to dress up and explain a decision to support the logic of their theorising. When they, initially, opted to bend to "working class opinion", it did not worry them at all).

In any situation where a large revolutionary working class movement does not exist, the gun-to-head appeal to responsibility, humanitarianism, and lesser evilism can almost always be counter-posed to an independent working class political assessment. In 1969 when the British Army was deployed to stop sectarian fighting in Derry and Belfast, enormous pressure was generated to support the use of the troops, or refrain from opposing their use, on the grounds that they had probably saved Catholic lives and that Catholics had welcomed them. A lot of socialists succumbed to the pressure. The IS (SWP) organisation did. The small minority at the September 1969 IS conference who resisted and called for opposition to the British imperialist troops were met with hysterical denunciation and slandered as "fascists" who "wanted a bloodbath". Yet it was those Marxists who refused to be panicked or to abandon their understanding of Britain's role in Ireland who had the better grasp of reality.

But then, Ted Grant might say, it was plainly a matter of a reactionary imperialist army. And in Afghanistan it is a matter of the thoroughly reactionary anti-working class army of the Russian bureaucracy.

If the Russians withdraw, it might well prove to be the case that the final result of the strange episode of the seizure of power by the putschist† PDP/Army bureaucratic revolutionaries would be a massacre of PDP supporters. That would be a tragedy. But it cannot follow that because of this Marxist socialists should abandon their programmatic opposition to the expansion of the area under Kremlin control. or should abandon the idea that the consolidation of a Stalinist regime in Afghanistan would be a defeat for the Afghan working class.

We cannot abandon independent working class politics for the lesser evil - for the PDP and the supporters of the Russians - in the situation which the putsch the policy of the PDP/Army and the Russian invasion has created for them. We are not, to quote Trotsky, the inspectors-general of history.

Political independence

The political independence of the working class and in this pioneering place the political independence of the Marxists, is the to-be-or-not-to-be question for socialism - independence from the bourgeoisie, from the labour bureaucracy and from the totalitarian state bureaucracies of the Stalinist states. This is the immediate political question for people who take Militant's pro-Stalinist line on Afghanistan for Marxism. While Militant is unlikely to influence events in Afghanistan it does influence people in Britain (and perhaps elsewhere). It influences them away from independent working-class politics and towards the role of cheerleaders for the "progressive" Stalinists in Afghanistan where it supports a Stalinist transformation, abandoning the very commitment to working class political independence as well as the Trotskyist programme.

Militant insists that the proper role for socialist militants is to line up firmly with one of the international blocs. It deplores the lack of class consciousness and failure to relate properly to the "major" contradiction to our time on the part of the British CP because it does not support the invasion. Militant even criticises the Tribunites, as we saw. for not basing themselves on the actual relations between the great powers.

Even the most wretched of the left reformist currents is too independent for "Labour's Marxist Voice".

Appendix

I summarised above what Trotsky's attitude to the expansion of the Stalinist state actually was in 1939-40. This is a much mythologised episode, and many "Trotskyists" think Trotsky supported Stalin's expansion. (Walsh does, for example). Some think that Trotsky identified with the "revolution" in eastern Poland. Nothing of the sort.

During the Stalinist occupation of Poland and invasion of Finland in 1939-40, Trotsky argued that revolutionaries must recognise that the Russian Army was likely to stimulate revolutionary struggle which the Stalinists would use against the Polish and Finnish ruling class - and then strangle. Revolutionaries should support any such independent working class and poor peasant mobilisation, and align themselves with it. They should at the same time try to warn the workers and peasants against the Stalinist Russian state and all its instruments as deadly enemies. They should immediately fight for political independence from the Stalinists… and prepare to fight them with guns.

It was a policy for the orientation of revolutionaries in a situation where (Trotsky assumed) the "Red" Army had still a revolutionary prestige and authority with the oppressed "Polish" Ukrainians, and others, where its call to seize land, etc., could be expected to evoke responses of a revolutionary sort. Nothing like that can be even imagined in Afghanistan now. The Russians have alienated even former supporters of the PDP.

And, as far as I know, Trotsky's assumptions about Eastern Poland and Finland were seriously mistaken. He was starved of concrete information). Even in 1939 the "Red" Army's power to rouse revolutionary action was minimal; its power to kill off Poles was much greater. Between one million and 1.5 m. Poles alone were deported to make Poland safe for Stalinism. (The Poles numbered five million out of 13 million in Eastern Poland, the rest being Ukrainians and White Russians. Trotsky partly acknowledged his misestimate (see In Defence of Marxism). And in any case, as we saw above, he did not hesitate to describe the fate of the people of East Poland, in so far as they were subjugated by the "Red" Army, as that of "the semi-slaves of Stalin". Where is the analogy with what Militant is supporting in Afghanistan? Militant is supporting the implied "promise" of nationalisations and agrarian reform to be carried out by a totalitarian state which has imposed itself by force, against the resistance of the people of Afghanistan. Where Militant part company with Marxism is clear at this point: they do not relate to the working class and its struggles and its interests [the struggle against repression, the struggle to secure the basis for its own free organisation - the sort of issue Marxists would relate to if they assumed, in an open, rational and demystified way, that a revolution was occurring but not a proletarian revolution]. The Stalinist 'revolution' will impose savagely oppressive regime, which will destroy and continually uproot any elements of a labour movement. To go from the clear and simple idea of 'defencism' - that the conquest of the Stalinist states by imperialism and their return to capitalism would be reactionary and should be opposed by socialists - to support for the conquest and hoped-for transformation of Afghanistan is to travel light-years away from revolutionary socialism. It is to take up residence on the grounds of Stalinism; to accommodate to the existing Stalinist bureaucracy with the "perspective" (i.e., passive hope) that after the totalitarian "stage" will come a better stage.

Part 1

Footnotes

* As on Afghanistan, so in British politics where Militant see their role as that of making propaganda for their "perspectives" about how things will develop. Eschewing action and struggle, they mistake the role of passive commentators and would-be prophets for a proper work of proletarian militants.

† This, of course, is sloppy - not a putsch, but a coup. Since nothing is built on calling it putsch and not a coup, the sloppiness is of no political consequence.