Note: This article was written in 1981. The theoretical framework on which it rests is not adequate.

We regarded Russia as a 'degenerated workers' state', and made a distinction between the Stalinist states in which the old ruling class had been destroyed, and states such as Egypt then, whose state economies we called 'state capitalism' because the old ruling class had survived and the statification of the economy was not likely to last (in Egypt the bought-out capitalists could trade their government bonds on the Cairo stock exchange). The collapse of the USSR in 1991 shows such distinctions to have been a lot less definite than we then thought. The description of the USSR as a 'degenerated workers' state' can now be seen to have been wrong, and wrong since about 1928, when the Stalinist bureaucracy made itself "sole master of the surplus product", to use Trotsky's description of it. In my opinion, the Stalinist states were best described as a distinct form of class society, 'bureaucratic collectivism'. Other comrades in Solidarity and Workers' Liberty think the Stalinist states were a form of 'state capitalism', using 'state capitalism' differently from the way it was used in this article 22 years ago.

S.M.,

August 2003

***
Unlike most other would-be Trotskyists, Workers' Action opposed the Russian invasion and called for the withdrawal of the troops. John O'Mahony [Sean Matgamna] examines the arguments put forward in favour of supporting the Russian occupation by Militant.

***
"What characterises Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude towards oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognising their 'rights' and parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of those rights. Bolshevism penetrates into the midst of the oppressed nations; it raises them up against their oppressors; it ties up their struggle with the struggle of the proletariat in advanced countries; it instructs the Chinese, Hindus or Arabs in the art of insurrection, and it accepts full responsibility for their work in the face of 'civilised' executioners. Here only does Bolshevism begin, that is, Revolutionary Marxism in action. Everything that does not step over that boundary remains centrism."
Leon Trotsky, What Next?

The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was a test case for the attitude of political tendencies towards Stalinism and towards the rights of oppressed nations.

Militant took some time to hammer out its response to the invasion. It took a very long article by Ted Grant and then, a month later, another long article by Lynn Walsh supplementing it, before their line was clear. The following article examines the emergence of Militant's line on the invasion of Afghanistan as expressed in those two articles and in an article by Alan Woods, published in July 1980, which brutally expressed the satisfaction with which this 'Trotskyist' tendency greeted the prospect of a Stalinist transformation in Afghanistan.

Militant's first response to the invasion was a three-page long article by Ted Grant (Militant, 18.1.80). The last third of the article fell apart into an unintegrated series of musings not too far above the stream-of-consciousness level. We shall see the consequences Despite that it was a knowledgeable analysis of the events that preceded the Russian occupation. Though the analytical framework was different, the essential features of Grant's description paralleled that presented in Workers' Action (12.1.80 and 19.1.80).

In contrast to the fantasies peddled by others who call themselves Trotskyists, (especially the SWP-USA and the large part of the USFI which consists of its international satellites), Grant knew quite well who it was that had made the original so-called revolution, that is the military coup of-April 1978:

"The April 1978 coup was based on a movement of the elite of the Army and the intellectuals and the top layers of professional middle-class people in the cities".

But he does not know what it was that they made. His definition of the regime that resulted rings strange in the ears of a Marxist.

"Conditions of mass misery and the corruption of the Daud regime resulted in a proletarian Bonapartist coup. Proletarian Bonapartism is a system in which landlordism and capitalism have been abolished [when?] but where power has not passed into the hands of the people, but is held by a one party, military-political dictatorship".

He goes on. "After the seizure of power, they abolished the mortgages and other debts of the peasants, who were completely dominated by the usurers, and carried through a land reform."

Now if this is what happened, it becomes impossible to explain why the regime had so little popular support, why its initial support declined, and why it needed the Russian Army to keep it in power.

What the PDP did

They did decree an end to usury and a cancellation of debts; they decreed steps towards equality for women; and they legislated a land reform - but they could not carry them out. Everywhere and in everything, they proved to have neither popular support that would move to gain through mass actions what the regime decreed, nor, alternatively, the strength and resources to manipulate from the top and to wean people from the age-old network of dependence on landlords, usurers, and priests (often the same people). They had neither a banking system to offer instead of the system around the usurers, nor an agricultural supply system to carry through the land reform. Their efforts from on high alienated the people, and their good intentions found real expression mainly in bureaucratic/military repression of their own people.

The whole experience was shaped by these facts. The Afghan 'revolution' was a coup by the officer corps of the air force and a section of the officer corps of the army, differing from other efforts by officers in backward societies to take the role of developers of the country (e.g., the coup of 1968 in Peru) in that the officers, trained and equipped by the USSR since 1955, took the bureaucratic USSR as their social model. And they took the bureaucracy itself as their model for their own future role.

Because of the link with the USSR and the magnetic attraction of the Stalinist states on the central state forces of Afghanistan, the PDP gained its major forces in the Army and among the urban middle class, especially in Kabul. Estimates of its strength at the time of the coup range from 2,000 (in an extremely well-informed article in the Financial Times, in l978) to 10,000 (Intercontinental Press, publication of the SWP-USA, which, give or take a few ritual criticisms, acted for six months after the invasion as vulgar propagandist for the USSR and the PDP in the style of the CPs in the 30s).

How extraordinary this was is best seen if translated into British figures. Its equivalent would be for a 'party' of between 5,000 and 25 or 30,000 to seize power in Britain via the army! Even this comparison is inexact, because of the structure of society in Afghanistan. The divide separating town from country, centuries and even millennia wide in terms of culture and development, meant that the Party and the upper layers of the Army were sealed-off from the masses in a way that would be impossible for even a small party in Britain.

Thus the PDP began alienated from the masses; and their behaviour deepened the alienation and drove the masses into the hands of the landlords and mullahs. This happened because of the extraordinarily elitist, bureaucratic, militarist, commandist attitude adopted by the regime. (It was absolutely typical of such military regimes, whether of right or 'left' persuasion, though there are examples of radical state capitalist regimes far less elitist than was the PDP/Army regime). Brute military force was their essential tool, at least outside of the main towns; and a severe permanent police-state terror decimated even the supporters of the April Coup. The PDP used force from the beginning with terrible abandon, sending the air force with bombs and napalm against recalcitrant villages. They seem to have thought this would be sufficient to implement their programme.

One gets a strange feeling from the accounts of the brutal regime of government ukases backed by napalm. It was as if they knew neither their own society nor themselves. They acted as if 'the revolution' was already made, as if the government could command the forces and the tides by its very word.

State Capitalist

It was as if they were mimicking the established Russian bureaucracy. The PDP was a bureaucratic, militaristic social formation in control of the state apparatus (though a state apparatus not even traditionally in full control of the society - one whose rural subjects are accustomed to bearing arms and acting for themselves). But the PDP stood an one side of a revolutionary transformation which had yet to be won, led, or even evoked. And the Russian bureaucracy - on which they modelled themselves - stands on the other side of a revolution of the working class and peasant masses, erecting its power on that revolution's political grave but also on its social-economic achievements and accomplishments.

In fact, as the statement of the Workers' Action editorial board defined it (9.2.80):

"The 20-month history of the PDP-Army regime, until the Russian invasion essentially put an end to it and replaced it, was marked by the narrow base of the regime and the attempt to use the armed forces as the instrument of a social transformation which proved obnoxious, for varying reasons, to the big majority of the population.

"Despite its unusually close links with the bureaucracy of the degenerated workers' state, the regime never got beyond the stage of being a military-bureaucratic state capitalist regime attempting to carry through the bourgeois programme of land reform, educational reform, and some easing of the enslavement of women.

"Its methods in relation to the Afghan masses were never other than military-bureaucratic: the bombing and strafing of villages, including the use of napalm, from the first weeks of the regime, and the figure of 400,000 mainly non-combatant refugees, graphically sum up the military-bureaucratic regime's relationship with the Afghan masses."

The central point is that the PDP did not carry through a revolution, and proved unable to do so. There are few clearer examples of the impotence of the middle class to achieve a revolution and open the way for serious development in the Third World today (though there are special problems in Afghanistan).

It was a middle-class regime, symbiotic with the Russian Stalinist regime, but still resting on the old state. It never succeeded in making itself, still less the society, into a replica of the USSR's social institutions, and the invasion snuffed out its independent development.

'Proletarian Bonapartism'

But Grant, as we have seen, views the Afghan events through the prism of his own special theory - the theory of 'proletarian bonapartism'.

'Proletarian bonapartism' describes regimes as identical to the Stalinist system on the sole basis of the state ownership of industry. It is a 'profile' derived from the features which the Stalinist states have in common in repose. What the theory lacks is any conception of the dynamic and the struggles whereby the Stalinist states have come into existence.

The East European states were subjugated by Russian military power and assimilated to the Russian system. Apart from that, the only Stalinist-type states (that is, states identical to the USSR) which have achieved any stability have had in common mass peasant (and sometimes working-class) mobilisations, under the leadership and control of militarised Stalinist parties. The Stalinists, via the mass mobilisation, break the state machine, or at least the upper layers linked to the old ruling classes, collectivise industry and the land, and radically root out the old ruling classes. As in 1928 in Russia, all major competitors for the surplus product are eliminated, and the newly-created bureaucracy then becomes the master of the state economy. In this way a truly radical break is made.

(Cuba is partly an exception. But there too there was a mass mobilisation and a radical overturn, with the new regime then settling over time into the Stalinist mould.)

In contrast, the general experience of regimes which have emulated statism purely from on top, without a radical overturn, has been that they tend to be unstable. There has been no real replication of the existing Stalinist states. In Egypt, for example, industry was statified, but the old ruling class was kept on (stock exchange dealings in Government compensation bonds continued, for example), and eventually reasserted itself. The Army acted as agent and caretaker for the bourgeoisie.

Grant and Militant have a history of being unable to distinguish between real Stalinist-type transformations and developments like in Egypt in the late 50s and the 60s. They consider Syria, Burma, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique, for example, as of the same order as the Stalinist states (deformed and degenerated workers' states). Their urge to play at 'prophets' and to 'spot the trend' leads them repeatedly to make foolish and hasty judgments. They briefly hailed Portugal as a workers' state in 1975, and are now seemingly on the brink of so classifying Iran.

They see a fundamental trend - the 'autonomous movement of the productive forces' - in the colonial revolutions of the Third World, manifesting itself everywhere, through many different forms. Thus Militant spent most of the 60s predicting the eventual manifestation of this trend within South Vietnam, and US withdrawal… while others were building the anti-war movement.

Analysing Afghanistan, Grant, the prisoner of his dogmas, scans the horizon for 'empirical' confirmation of what he knows in his heart, and so decrees that the PDP regime was proletarian Bonapartist - whereas the whole dynamic of the events he is dealing with derives from the PDP's failure to be what he calls a proletarian bonapartist regime.

When Grant assimilates the pre-invasion Afghan regime to his proletarian bonapartist scheme, then he, like the regime itself, mistakes form for substance, government decrees for achievements, impotent middle class aspirations to be a Stalinist bureaucracy for a society in which the old ruling class has been overthrown.

The invasion

Why, in Grant's view, did the Russians invade?

Because "the Russian bureaucracy… could not tolerate the overthrow, for the first time in the post-war period, of a regime based on [?] the elimination of landlordism and capitalism and the victory of a feudal-capitalist counter-revolution, especially in a state boarding on the Soviet Union."

Fear of the ferment spilling over to the Muslim population of the USSR was also a motive. The Russian bureaucracy, thus, intervened, "not only because of Afghanistan's strategic position, but for reasons of their own power and prestige."

Grant denounces the hypocrisy of the imperialist outcry and chronicles recent imperialist 'interventions' - South Africa in Angola and Zimbabwe, Belgium in Zaire and France in Chad and Zaire. True, as far as it goes, but it obliterates in a cloud of minor propaganda/agitational points what is new in Afghanistan - the fact that the USSR, acting from strength, was overstepping the agreed boundaries that had prevailed since World War Two.

The US, says Grant, is using the pretext of Afghanistan and "attempting to hit at Russia because of the class character of the Soviet Union, where landlordism and capitalism have been eliminated". This is typical Grant-thought. Basic, general historic truths about capitalist class antagonism to the anti-capitalist regime are used to 'explain' specific developments.

What response, asks Grant, should socialists make to the invasion? How do we advise the labour movement to see it?

Grant and Stalinism

Grant attacks the Communist Parties for opposing the invasion because, he says, they proceed from "abstract principles" of opposition to "aggression between peoples", support for the UN, etc - "instead of viewing the process from the point of view of the class struggle internationally and the class relations between the nations". Which means? Grant doesn-t tell us. Others - his pupils - subsequently will. In fact, it is a way for Grant to evade the by no means abstract question of what the Afghan masses would choose.

Everything is skewed by Grant's basic attitude to Stalinism. Forty and more years after Trotsky and the Bolshevik rearguard publicly declared that a river of blood separated Stalinism and Bolshevism, Grant is still - in his mind - engaged in a political and ideological dialogue with the Stalinist bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in the 1920s accused Trotsky of wanting to use the Red Army to "export revolution". (Grant mistakenly asserts that Trotsky did advocate this). Lo and behold, says Ted Grant in 1980, we now have a grossly bureaucratic use of the Red Army (the same Red Army?!) without the support of the workers, etc. The point of course is that the Russian bureaucracy is necessarily against the workers and the common people of Afghanistan.

In the same vein, as a critic of the technique and crudities of the bureaucracy, Grant comes to his central objection to the invasion. It will repel the international working class. The Russian state conducted itself differently in Lenin's and Trotsky's time. "They based themselves on proposals and actions which would raise the level of consciousness of the working class internationally." "Anything which acted to raise the consciousness of the working class was justified; anything which had the opposite effect was to be condemned", etc., etc. Yes (though the Bolsheviks were sometimes forced to do things irrespective of the effect on international working class consciousness). But what have Lenin and Trotsky got to do with the present Moscow regime, with its character, selection, education, motivation, lifestyle, relationship to the Russian and other USSR peoples, relationship to the workers in the USSR or outside it? The answer, for Ted Grant, seems to be that they carry on the same business in a "distorted" way. The train of thought runs on tracks laid down by Isaac Deutscher - Stalinism is the continuation of Bolshevism, or at least the custodian of its social-economic achievements and the transplanter of them to other countries, carrying them on the point of bayonets to people who are crushed by tanks if they resist.

This is very strange stuff. But it is of interest as illustrating the confused thought processes of the main political leader of one of the biggest groups in Britain calling itself Trotskyist (a group which also has some supporters outside Britain). He is confused to the point of seemingly not knowing who he is supposed to be, who and what the Stalinist rulers of the USSR are, and what their relationship is to the working class. He is seemingly confused about what time of the political clock it is. Like the legendary professor of history who asked a colleague, "what century is this?", Ted Grant must have occasion to ask his associates "What decade is this?". (But they won't be able to tell him!)

Having explained at great length the different techniques of the bureaucracy and of Marxist working-class revolutionaries, Grant then comes close to the truth that it is a matter of different people, of a different social formation, and of different aims. He puts his own gloss on this. The policies of the proletarian bonapartist regime in the USSR are determined by the "income, power, prestige and privilege" of the bureaucracy. But they support revolutions in backward countries - when it takes place in the distorted form of proletarian bonapartism. That's only for backward countries with "distorted revolutions" - "they are opposed to a socialist revolution in advanced countries because… the establishment of a democratic socialist regime in any country in the world would immediately threaten the foundations of the bureaucratic misrule in Russia, China, and the other Stalinist states". This seems to mean that despite what they are, and in the course of serving their own interests, the Russian bureaucracy can nevertheless do good work in backward countries. But Grant manages simultaneously to conflate and link as parallel phenomena the workers' revolution and the mutations: the idea is clearly one of distinct stages reflecting levels of development. At the same time Grant's scheme of workers' socialist revolution for advanced countries, "distorted (Stalinist) revolution" for backward countries, ignores the fact that the Stalinist bureaucracy has made its own 'revolution' in advanced countries too - in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany (a backward part of Germany, but that is relative), on condition of having military-bureaucratic rule over them.

Now Grant gets to the crux. The ending of feudalism and capitalism in Afghanistan opens the way to bring that country into the 20th century. "If we just considered the Russian intervention in isolation, we should have to give this move critical support".

"But because of the reactionary effect it has on the consciousness of the working class… Marxists must oppose the Russian intervention".

"The Russian intervention in Afghanistan must be condemned despite its progressive aspects, because it is spitting at the opinions of the world working class".

It is clear from the article that when he talks about the bad effects on working class consciousness of the invasion, he has something specific in mind. "The overriding danger under contemporary conditions is the alienation of the workers of Japan, Western Europe, the USA and other advanced countries from the idea of socialism and socialist revolution [i.e. Russia?!]. This is shown by the attitudes taken by the [left labour] Tribunites. Like the CP, they unfortunately base themselves not on the real movement of the class struggle and on the actual relations between the great powers [sic] but, on the contrary, rely on abstract moral condemnations. But world antagonisms are a reflection of the dialectical contradictions between the capitalist states, and, above all, of the major contradiction of our time, that between the Stalinist states, on the one hand, and the countries of capitalism on the other".

It is clear that Grant is being tossed between the implications and necessary conclusions from his theory, and the pressure of the Tribunites. It may, "in isolation", be progressive in Afghanistan, but it makes life difficult in the Labour Party! The complete prostration into bloc politics, and the consequent abandonment of independent working class politics, should be noted.

But Grant deplores the invasion. Should the Russians then withdraw? Grant seems to think so, though it is not quite clear. His way of expressing it is to dismiss "the demand by the imperialist powers supported by the CP[GB] and the Tribune group" as "utopian". (Why? Grant adds immediately after this: "Russia, of course has vetoed this demand in the UN Council").

It seems that the CPs should be criticised for no longer automatically backing what Moscow does. Nothing here is abstract, or "idealistic", or contrary to "the real movement of the class struggle" and the taking of sides with one bloc in "the major contradiction of our time". The advancing tanks move, backed by History, and all your programmes and tears will not roll them back one inch!

Finally; what prospects does Grant see in Afghanistan?

"Balancing between the different nationalities of Afghanistan, and leaning on the poor and middle peasants, the Afghan regime, based on Russian bayonets, will undoubtedly be able to crush the rebels and establish a firm proletarian bonapartist state as a Soviet satellite". But things won't be so bad. "Once the counter-revolution has been defeated. most of the Russian troops will be withdrawn… The Bonapartist regime and the Russians will find a way to compromise with the mullahs".

Essentially this is the same basic assessment as was made in Workers' Action last January. But the niceminded "optimism" is Ted Grant's.

The international contradictions will soften, too. Russia may, in response to the American trade reprisals, back the Baluchis and Pathans in Pakistan and maybe "fulfil the old dream of Tsarist diplomacy, a warm water port". But "before things go that far, however, it is likely in the not too distant future, that there will be a compromise between the US and the bureaucracy." This soporific message will perhaps lull the many readers of Militant who did not have the duty in 1965 and after to read Militant's monthly assurance that compromise was just ahead in Vietnam. It has the effect, however, of minimising the degree of blame the readers of Militant will attach to the bureaucracy for the invasion and the boost it has given to the warmongers.

Setting it straight?

Grant's article, though it left many things in the air, seemed to come out against the Russian invasion. In fact, it was utterly contradictory. The whole assessment of the "progressive" side of the effective annexation of Afghanistan implied support for it. The opposition to the invasion was grounded in the need to bow to working class public opinion. Grant declined to take a stand on an independent working class political assessment, and confined himself to describing a process and scoffing at the "utopians" of the CPGB and Tribune.

Within a short time, some of Grant's pupils inserted the appropriate explicitly Stalinist politics.

One month after Grant's analysis there appeared part one of a two-part reply to a letter from 'Roy Bentley', who had "just read" Ted Grant's article. He wanted to inquire what Grant's line really had been! He offered an interpretation, based on Grant's comment that the call for withdrawal was "utopian". Does that mean that Militant is against the "withdrawal of the troops, having quite rightly condemned, the invasion"? He "could see" that if the Russian troops were withdrawn, "the Afghan regime of Karmal would soon collapse and there would be an almost inevitable bloodbath and a return to feudal landowning and backwardness… This would justify support for the troops being there now they have invaded. Is this the position Militant is putting forward?"

"Roy has indeed drawn the right conclusion from Ted's article" began the reply. Thus, ludicrously, Militant began to correct itself. The reply, by Lynn Walsh; made the following new points.

To call for withdrawal would open up the risk of "Afghanistan's proletarian bonapartist regime" being overthrown. (But where was there a regime other than the one installed against the government that they said invited the troops in? This is a bit of camouflage. The Russian troops are the regime). Supporting withdrawal would therefore mean siding with the forces of counter-revolution. (The whole question of any rights for the Afghan people is wiped out by equating the Russians with the left, and by the pretence that the regime still has an independent existence). Militant couldn't support the invasion "because of the reactionary consequences, however, it would have been entirely wrong for Marxists to call for the withdrawal of Russian troops". In other words - don't take responsibility, but be glad the bureaucracy is not so fastidious. This attitude of saying 'no' while meaning 'yes' combined the joys of abstention from direct responsibility with those of vicarious real politic via hypocrisy. If it is necessary for the troops to stay, on pain of undesirable consequences, then it was right to send them in in the first place. Responsible people should have called for the invasion and should acknowledge now that the initiative of the bureaucracy (even for motives of their own) showed them their error if they didn't. Serious people should - like the SWP-USA - praise the historically progressive role being played by the bureaucracy in Afghanistan.

But Walsh continued: "The Russian intervention in Afghanistan was a progressive move" - Grant is quoted as stating this, though in fact he said it would be progressive if it could be taken in isolation, and that in fact it could not be. "The reactionary international repercussions of invasion completely outweigh any immediate gains in Afghanistan", admitted Walsh; but preventing the downfall of a proletarian bonapartist military regime was "in itself" another blow to world imperialism. And the invasion "established the development of historically progressive social relations in this small country."

"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".

A mass base of support for the regime (that is, for Stalinism) will be created by land reform, planning, etc. "When the proletarian bonapartist regime is consolidated in Afghanistan, which will be within a measurable period, the Russian leadership [sic] will probably withdraw" its forces. But adds Walsh defiantly, "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 troops!"

What exists in Afghanistan is "a grotesque totalitarian caricature of a socialist state", "because of the isolation of the social change in an economically and culturally backward country, and the fact that the bonapartist leadership has inevitably taken Russia's Stalinist regime as its model". (Apart from the fact that it is nonsense now to pretend that the regime has an independent existence, it is not isolated: the character of the regime is determined now not by the conditions in its own society alone, but by the bureaucratic domination of the much more developed Russian society. It is that Russian domination that determined the shape of the regime even in immensely more developed Czechoslovakia.)

Walsh insists that Militant "stands for a further supplementary political revolution". But this is an epochal perspective. For Afghanistan it would be after a whole historical period. In Walsh's scheme, the first stage is the growth of support for the regime, under the Russian tanks, whose presence Militant supports. And Walsh underlines the point: in Russia and Eastern Europe the bureaucracy; has "outlived any progressive role it played in the past through developing the planned economy" (When was it progressive in Czechoslovakia, for example?) But not in Afghanistan. There it has prospects of an organic growth and-consolidation of mass support, with the bureaucracy as the natural leading force, despite its methods, for society at that stage - the bearer of a higher civilisation.

Part 2 [1]