Workers' Liberty

In defence of the October Revolution: Kabul 1978 and Petrograd 1917. Was the Russian Revolution a 'coup'? By Sean Matgamna (August 2004). Download pdf or read articles in html below.

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.

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.

October 1917 was a "coup"

J-J, blindly cribbing, now presents his "cover version" of Emine Engin on coups and revolution - including her bizarre idea that Otto von Bismarck organised a coup and the no less bizarre idea that Frederick Engels discussed "Bismarck's coup".

Ireland and Afghanistan: the test of experience

We have already dealt with what J-J says about the 1916 Dublin Rising. There are additional points to make and some points to expand. Remember J-J:

Revolutions only bring chaos?

"For [AWL] the overthrow of Mohammed Daud's - republican-royal - regime by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was a "Stalinist military coup" which brought upon the heads of the masses nothing but decades of terrible suffering. Exactly the same message pushed by the White House, CIA, BBC, Hollywood action films, The Sun and the whole well oiled imperialist propaganda machine."

Putsch, coup and revolution

J-J: "The Afghan 1978 revolution was carried out from above… But that can also be said of many revolutions in the Twentieth Century. Egypt and Abdel Nasser's free officers movement of July 1952….Iraq…in July 1958. Even Comrade Matgamna [in WL] grudgingly (sic) admits (sic) that the Afghan revolution was a political revolution… Yet the 1978 revolution was not led by a small military group or clique… The PDPA was predominantly a civilian party that illegally organised secret cells inside the armed forces of the existing state, which it then managed to decisively split. So was Afghanistan's revolution a mere conspiracy hatched within the state machine, lacking in popular support or sympathy and only altering things at the top of society?"

"…The form of a rising can be that of a coup - like the October revolution of 1917…" Jack Conrad

This is wilful lying in which a partial truth - all those groups, together with all rational observers, save only the WV/Leninist, did define April 1978 as a coup - is used to tell a big factional lie about Workers' Power and the Spartacist League. They were avid supporters of the Stalinist coup and of the Russian invaders!

"Soviet willingness to desert Afghanistan must be put in context, the context of world revolution. The fact is that the world revolution has reached a particularly complex interregnum.

All the elements of Karaoke Jack's politics, on Afghanistan and in general, are there. The article is written in the spirit of the New Worker's injunction of "No concessions! No Compromise" with the Polish working class. Jack Conrad wants full steam ahead in the subjugation of Afghanistan.

The PDPA worked essentially amongst officers who had trained in the USSR or had become impressed with the USSR as a model of how a backward country could be developed, and wanted to try Stalinist methods. Neither PDPA, as such, nor the PDPA officers, related to the rank and file other than through the normal military hierarchy.

The first issue of The Leninist, in 1981, staked out its political ground on the Afghan question in an article called "The Paradox of Afghanistan" by James Marshall (who is the same person as Jack Conrad).

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."

At the [Democratic] Conference…we must prepare a brief declaration in the name of the Bolsheviks, sharply emphasising the irrelevance of long speeches and of "speeches" in general, the necessity for immediate action in order to save the revolution, the absolute necessity for a complete break with the bourgeoisie, for the removal of the whole of the present government, for a complete severance of relations with the Anglo-French imperialists, who are preparing a "separate" partition of Russia, and for the immediate transfer of the whole power to the revolutionary democracy headed by the revolutionary proletariat.

"In Turkey, Revolutionary Path, Liberation and Accumulation… all say that it was a coup. Those who call it a coup put forward such views as that the revolution was effected through an uprising in the army, that a section of the counterrevolutionary Muslim guerillas had found a base among the peasantry, and that the revolution was announced to the country over the radio. Let us too touch briefly upon the question of coup or revolution."

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.

I will trace the politics on Afghanistan of the political tendency led by the Workers' Voice segment of the Turkish Communist Party, whose British affiliate was what is now the Weekly Worker group/Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

First, I will summarise briefly the main facts about Afghanistan. For more detail, see the article "Afghanistan and the Shape of the 20th Century" ("Afghanistan…"), in Workers' Liberty 2/2.

It will be helpful first to outline the general ideas that formed the basis of the peculiar variant of Stalinism propounded by the group which today calls itself the Communist Party of Great Britain (

The Weekly Worker group/Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) originated as a small, still ultra-Stalinist, offshoot from the New Communist Party (NCP), which was a stone-age Stalinist breakaway from the real CPGB in 1977.

The Afghan Stalinist coup d'état of April (Saur) 1978 had enormous consequences. The "Great Saur Revolution" led directly to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979.