28.11.1996

In defence of the Afghan revolution

Eddie Ford writes that the horror unfolding in Afghanistan should lead the left “to re-examine” their past positions, to “assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of their organisations’ theoretical and political framework” (Weekly Worker October 17). While he does a fair (but patchy) job of highlighting some of the more crass positions of other revolutionary organisations, he fails to take his own advice.

Back copies of The Leninist always make for a good read and I’m pleased to see that comrade Ford used them extensively in his article. These too should be read critically however, nor simply plundered for what could be called a photo-fit polemic against the rest of the left. Using that method, even the guilty will not recognise themselves.

One fundamental aspect of the debate that Eddie does not touch on is the nature of the April 1978 overturn. This is a pity, as it was probably the most important question that divided the left and provides the explanation for much of its subsequent confusion and lurch into reactionary positions.

Were the events of April 1978 a “coup” or a revolution? If a revolution, what was the nature of the force that led it, the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan? These questions hold the key to a correct communist position on the tragedy that has engulfed that country.

Whatever their subsequent positions, the vast majority of the revolutionary left in this country and around the world were united in their assessment of the April 1978 upheaval as a “coup” or “putsch”. The Leninist - correctly in my view - rejected this as a slander of a heroic revolution, a potential progressive beacon for the whole of central Asia.

Lenin defined a putsch as an “Attempt at insurrection [that] has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and [has] aroused no sympathy among the masses” (Collected Works vol 22, p355). Only those blinded by their dogma could suggest that this definition applied to Afghanistan in April 1978.

Society was in turmoil, with all sections being drawn into the vortex of crisis. Thus, while the revolutionary blow initially took the outward form of a military revolt, its content was the execution of the social mandate of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The insurrection was launched on the instruction of the civilian leadership of the party, in particular Hafizullah Amin, head of the revolutionary wing of the PDPA. Amin was the effective leader of these party units in the Afghan military.

Despite the fact that military units were the strike force of the revolution, the government formed in April 1978 was overwhelmingly made up of civilian members of the PDPA, not a narrow clique of generals or ‘moderniser’ elements among the officer corps.

Was this party a flag of convenience for “a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs”? Hardly. The PDPA was formed in 1965 and claimed roots in the short-lived Communist Party of Afghanistan of the 1920s. Whatever the political legitimacy of this claim, it certainly was an organisation with a history of leading mass progressive struggles in the country. This is why the revolution - with the PDPA the undisputed leader of it - was greeted by huge demonstrations of support, particularly in Kabul.

Developments in the pre-revolutionary period also indicate the banality of labelling this upsurge a “coup”. The Daoud coup of 1973 - touted by the likes of the New Communist Party as a ‘left’ development worthy of support - essentially tinkered with the state apparatus. Some 50 army officers were ‘encouraged’ to retire but the system remained essentially intact. With the coming to power of the PDPA only one army general was maintained (a party member). The other 60 were either killed or purged. Likewise the state apparatus was thoroughly cleansed and people loyal to the new order installed.

Of course, this is simply indicative that something more profound than a putsch had taken place.

The smashing and dispersal of the old state consisted precisely in the form the revolution itself took - the assault on the old order by a section of the army acting under the leadership of the PDPA.

Thus, we see in Afghanistan in 1978 a profound split in the Afghan army - exacerbated by the social crises affecting all sections of society, the winning of a whole section of this central part of the disintegrating state apparatus to the side of the insurrection by the revolutionary party, an organisation with deep roots in society. How can this be characterised as anything other than a revolution, whatever the particular forms it adopts?

How are we to characterise this revolution? Throughout the 1980s, The Leninist stood by the thesis that the revolution had “ushered in a new order, a dictatorship of the proletariat” (Jack Conrad The Leninist February 10 1988). I think we must now say that this assessment was not correct.

This is not to give credence to those like the Spartacist League who claimed that “a social revolution in this profoundly backward country could only be introduced from without, through the agency of the Red Army ... The Leninist is forced to conjure up a dictatorship of the proletariat in a country where there is no proletariat to speak of (Workers Vanguard March 25 1987). This flies in the face of the real experience of the workers’ movement and is an (unconscious) concession to Menshevism.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks precisely recognised that the contradictions engendered by the existence of a world system of imperialism and a world proletariat made democratic revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat even in profoundly backward countries possible (their long-term prospects for survival without the spread of world socialism to advanced countries was another matter). The PDPA government in Kabul did not represent a dictatorship of the proletariat - even in distorted form - because of political factors, not because of the backwardness of the country or the undeveloped nature of bourgeois class relations.

At its founding in 1965, the PDP A declared itself “the party of the working class, armed with the ideology of the working class” (cited in Emine Engin The revolution in Afghanistan p21). Given the nature of the country and the numerical weakness of the working class, such a party could not expect to be fully proletarian without struggle and differentiation. Zinoviev describes this process in his History of the Bolshevik Party as a living, dialectical process of formation, involving the “departure of some groups and the adherence of others”, a “relentless renewal of its elements” as it “is subject to perpetual crystallisations, regroupings, splits and trails” (pp22-23).

The embryonic stirrings of such a process soon erupted between a revolutionary wing - Khalq (The people) - and the reformists united around the Parcham (Flag) newspaper.

While we should certainly be clear that this division did represent a revolutionary/reformist schism - as amply illustrated by the revolution itself, which was in effect led by Khalq - it is not possible to characterise the left as proletarian revolutionaries.

Certainly they use the rhetoric of communism - but then so did the opportunists. Given the geo-political position of the country, the Soviet Union (like its Tsarist forerunner) has always exerted huge influence. In countries such as Afghanistan, even the bourgeoisie would talk of ‘socialism’ and mouth the rhetoric of ‘official’ world communist movement ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

From its birth the PDPA characterised itself as part of this movement, and its official ideology - in both its left and right manifestations in the party - was based on the nostrums of the mainstream official line of the movement in general, and the Soviet Party in particular. (This of course is another reason why petty bourgeois revolutionary groups cannot admit that a revolution took place in 1979. Hidebound by the dogma of Trotskyism, they cannot countenance that a party from this movement can play anything other than a “counterrevolutionary” role.)

Within the PDPA itself was posed the essential tension in the popular democratic struggle of the Afghan people, a category that can at times include the bourgeoisie. A ‘people’ in this political sense of the word refers to a group of classes and strata, in a definite country at a definite stage of development, whose interests objectively contradict the interests of the ruling class. It is an objective category: regardless of whether or not the people are conscious of these interests, they still exist.

Afghan society was developing. Despite being a backward, dependent country, capitalist production relations, closely bound up with widespread and obstinate feudal forms, were newly developing in the direction of becoming the dominant mode of production. The social unrest and differentiation this profound change engendered created the raw material for revolt. Essentially, what we saw was a demand for a democratic revolution emanating from the popular mass - that is, those sections of the people drawn into action, the crowds in struggle. From the ascendant bourgeoisie - locked in a relationship of both contradiction and unity with the feudal establishment - the pressure was for an evolutionary development in alliance with the more progressive elements of the ancien regime.

This was the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the development of the Afghan revolution, a contradiction that found its expression in its own particular way in the PDPA itself. The revolutionary Khalq wing of the party brilliantly utilised these social tensions to make a popular democratic revolution in 1978. Given the nature of the party and the history of the country, it was not surprising that these revolutionaries looked to the USSR and the ‘orthodox’ world communist movement to legitimise their project of democratising the country and dragging it into the 20th century.

While they remained within the paradigm of ‘official communist’ centrism, the revolutionaries in Afghanistan could not establish a proletarian dictatorship, even in a distorted form. Yet in order for the democratic revolution to survive in that country, it needed to move on uninterruptedly, advancing mass popular democracy in all spheres. The revolution needed to be extended internally and - crucially - externally.

This the Khalq wing of the party conspicuously failed to do. Far from being guilty of ultra-left adventurism, in fact it temporised on land reform and other progressive measures while the counterrevolution organised and gathered strength. These brave revolutionaries’ final, desperate calls for Soviet military assistance underline their programmatic failure. A failure that was to seal their fate when that ‘aid’ finally did arrive and, in the long run, destroyed the revolution itself.

Mark Fischer