UNITE! Info #019en-rep: |
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Social-imperialism's Afghan war
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Intro note, 2008:Here I'm bringing, in more easily readable html form, with a few notes added too, a repeat of my "UNITE! Info #019en", which was sent to some newsgroups, mailing lists and individual e-mail addresses on 09.10.1996.I'm doing this above all because obviously still today, there are some people in the world, including some who otherwise have appeared neither to be totally ignorant nor totally reactionary, who say that there was "no" social-imperialism in the former Soviet Union, "neither" from the mid-1960s on approximately "nor" from some later point or other on, up until that state's demise in 1991. One may wonder then, whether those people perhaps have never heard of or read about that war in Afghanistan which that state engaged in from 1979 to 1989 and which certainly - at least to all who had or have eyes and ears of their own, and possibly a head among whose functions was/is not only such as that of nodding approval with to the statements of some groups or other of other people, but also that of thinking with - exposed the true character, at that time, of that state, the Soviet Union, as clearly and indubitably as did the somewhat earlier Vietnam war expose the true character of that other big power in the world, the United States of America. This repeat Info item above all is intended, as was its original version, to provide some information about that war to those who so far have had only very little such, or perhaps none at all. Some further things which it's also intended to bring some information about, in the same context, readers will see in its table of contents which appears further below too and which I'm showing, in a "condensed" form, already here: Chapter 1: What took place in Afghanistan in 1979-1989 - Chapter 2: A discussion among Soviet leaders, 1979 - Chapter 3: Certain "Marxists" today on events '79-'89 - Chapter 4: On Quisling "Marxism" and its root causes, on the strange "theory" of "Stalinism" and on the superpowers as rivals and allies. One "highlight" from Chapter 2 which I think is particularly instructive concerning one still today interesting method by some people to try to disguise themselves and their intentions, in a manner also demonstrated in the rather well-known fairytale "Little Red Riding Hood", I want to show readers at once too. It's an excerpt from a discussion held in the Soviet Union in March 1979. I'm bringing it here without those comments of mine within brackets which are included when the same passage appears again in Chapter 2 below. That person by the name of Taraki who is mentioned here was one of the then Soviet leaders' "friends" in Afghanistan, of that type of such who at least in certain countries in the world since back in World War II are known as "Quislings". And whether (even) that rather well-known member of the Soviet revisionist ruling clique of that time, Kosygin, was genuinely shocked at one certain request by that particular Quisling (who, it should be mentioned, was also masquerading as a "Marxist"), or whether he just was feigning to be, I of course cannot know: "During Taraki's continued consultations with Kosygin, Gromyko, Ustinov and Ponomarev, Ustinov was able to promise Soviet shipment of 12 Mi-24-type helicopters. Citing the unreliability of those Afghan helicopter pilots who had been trained in the Soviet Union ("Moslem brothers" or "pro-Chinese"), Taraki asked for the assistance of pilots and also tank crews from Cuba, Vietnam or other socialist countries.Today as everybody knows, there, since October 2001, is going on another genocidal imperialist aggression against Afghanistan, this time one perpetrated by the US imperialists and some of their "friends". Against this and not least against the criminal participation in it by the internationally-exploiting and miserably hypocritical ruling cliques here in Sweden too, a small but no doubt, at least indirectly, very widely-supported organization in this country is protesting, Föreningen Afghanistansolidaritet, of which I'm a member and which has a website at www.afghanistan.nu. That other and now ongoing imperialist aggression against Afghanistan is another question, which I shall not go into further here, except for only mentioning, for completeness' sake, some articles which I on my part so far have written, entirely or in part (or, in some cases, have reproduced), concerning that aggression, in the "UNITE! Infos": #156en, "After NY & Toulouse, now Kabul" (10.10.2001), part 1/2 and part 2/2 #157en, "The Afghanistan war 'success'" (29.11.2001), part 1/2 and part 2/2 #158en, "Kama Ado - US: 'nothing happened'" (06.12.2001) #159en, "E. Margolis on US' Afghan war" (11.12.2001) #173en, "Kick the USA out of the UN!" (28.06.2002) #226en, "Tyranny weaker than Bush pretends" (28.01.2005) #263en, "Afghanistan invaders' atrocities and failure" (22.09.2006) #281en, "US-NATO atrocity in Afghanistan, with Swedish support" (02.07.2007) #302en, "On Pakistan, Afghanistan, A-bombs and oil" (03.01.2008) |
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Intro note (1996):Two recent "UNITE! Info" items, #16en [Added in 2008: See part 1/2 and part 2/2] and #17en, of 04.10.96 and 05.10.96 respectively, have been dealing indirectly and in part also directly with the question of the aggression by Soviet social-imperialism (which today no longer is in existence as such) against a third-world country, Afghanistan, in 1979-1989. This item too, and now more or less wholly, will be dedicated to the same theme. Why? Why do I hold this question to be such a relatively important one?The social-imperialists' overt aggression in Afghanistan in '79-'89 today is already history. But it's still something which shows up with quite extraordinary clarity the sharp difference between Marxism, on the one hand, and revisionism, on the other. And the phenomenon of revisionism, that's one of the most important political phenomena of all in our century. What is revisionism? It's Marxism, socialism, proletarian politics in words but bourgeois politics, even imperialism, in deeds. A discussion on this phenomenon and its root causes follows in one of the chapters below. The openly bourgeois media, in the Western countries, for instance, of course never use the word "revisionism", at least not in this important political sense. To them, everybody is a "Communist" who has proclaimed him/her/self to be one, and the same goes for parties - indeed, such revisionist parties as no longer even find it tactically wise even to try to pose as "Communist" still continue to be called so by the openly bourgeois media. This of course is done in order to make it more difficult for the masses of people to distinguish between actual Communism on the one hand and revisionism on the other, and to discredit the very idea of Communism. For Marxists, naturally it's vital to draw a sharp dividing line between the genuine and the faked (notwithstanding the fact that it sometimes may be difficult to see which is which) and to enlighten everybody on this. An infamous example of a state ruled by revisionists is the China of today, which, as all (who know some elementary facts of history) can see, is completely different from the earlier, socialist China which was guided by Mao Zedong's genuinely Marxist political line. An even more infamous example of such a state was the Soviet Union of yesterday (from approximately the mid-50:s until 1991). The aggression of that state against Afghanistan exposed to the whole world, even more clearly than its earlier crimes, the true character of it, and importantly contributed to its eventual downfall. Just as the US war of aggression in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the late '60:s and early '70:s very clearly and to the whole world exposed the true character of US imperialism, and that of its hackneyed supporters too, so did the Afghan war of the Soviet Union expose the true character of that state and of its hackneyed supporters. This was so, despite the fact that in both of those cases of superpower aggression there was a certain amount of meddling on the part of the other superpower too, which tried to further its own interests under the guise of "supporting" the resistance of the respective country against the invader and his puppets. After the invading Soviet troops were forced to leave Afghanistan, in 1989, internal strife has continued in that country, undoubtedly to a great extent caused and aggravated by continued interference by both superpowers. One of the warring factions, the Taleban, recently conquered the capital and i.a. executed one of the earlier leaders of the Soviet social-imperialists' puppet regime in the country, Najibullah. This occasioned a heated exchange among some people who all are calling themselves "Marxists". I on my part expressed, on the Jefferson Village Virginia Marxism list, my opinion that this at least was a just action on the part of the Taleban. Some others protested against this, and in quite violent terms too. They made clear their staunch support for the earlier actions undertaken by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and for those of its puppet regime. How could someone who opposed these "very beneficial" and "civilizing" deeds even be allowed on a Marxism list at all, how could he indeed be considered a "civilized" person? In this direction went one "trend of thought". This discussion, or whatever you might call it, is the immediate reason why I've now dedicated some Info items to the question of events in Afghanistan 1979-1989. The present one contains the following more or less brief chapters (each in one of the four parts of this item) [Added in 2008: In this repeat, there's only one part]:
Chapter 1: What took place in Afghanistan in 1979-1989In essence and very briefly, events in that country during that time may be described in the following terms.Soviet social-imperialist aggression against Afghanistan was initiated on 27.12.1979. In a manner infamous in connection with other imperialist invasions, Soviet troops were "called in" by a "government" which thereby wholly transformed itself into a puppet "government". They were resisted by the people. By January 1980, the number of Soviet troops in the country had reached 85,000. The US imperialists eventually supported (with or without quotation marks) the resistance but did not intervene directly. In 1989, the social-imperialists were forced to withdraw their own troops, leaving behind some forces which to a greater or lesser degree continued to act as their proxies. During the 10-years long war of open aggression,
In other words, this was a very "typical" genocidal imperialist war. To the elementary and well-known facts mentioned above, some descriptions of events in Afghanistan in 1979-89 which I'll quote in Chapter 3 should be compared. In a pamphlet published in English in 1985 by the solidarity movement in Sweden for the Afghan people's struggle against the aggression, this kind of propaganda in favour of that aggression was also commented on. I'll quote some passages from that pamphlet, "Soviet Out of Afghanistan!", which initially mentioned some facts on the Swedish solidarity movement: "The largest demonstration to date in Sweden against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was held on March 23, 1985. The demonstrators in Stockholm marched from Norra Bantorget to Kungsträdgården. The organizers counted more than 6,000 participants."[On the last-mentioned here, I on my part would like to comment that the Swedish so-called "policy of neutrality" of course always did contain a considerable amount of hypocrisy. Sweden was and is among the exploiting countries; Afghanistan was and is a third-world country, one of the exploited countries in the world.] "For centuries Afghanistan has lain like a grain of wheat between two immense millstones, the Russian Central Asian empire and the British Indian empire, and still refused to let itself be crushed. For 150 years the Afghans have pursued a policy of neutrality every bit as consistently as the Swedish." [See comment above.] "That policy has now been ended by the Russian occupation."[It may be of interest, also in other contexts, to note that at that time, 23.03.1985, Swedish Prime Minister Palme, among others, sent a message to the demonstrations. As far as I remember, this was the first time he had supported this solidarity movement in this manner. (Added in 2008: See also Info #058en, "Palme's murderers protected", 07.12.1997, part 1/2 and part 2/2.) Two brief excerpts from the message, as reproduced in the same pamphlet:] "The Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan is a flagrant violation of that nation's sovereignty and national integrity." Chapter 2: A discussion among Soviet leaders, 1979After the breaking up of the Soviet Union in 1991, many earlier confidential Soviet documents were made public, among them some protocols of discussions in the Soviet revisionist party's Politbureau. Here I shall quote from some extracts from one such protocol, that of a session lasting three days in March 1979. My source is the issue No. 4/1994 of the Swedish-language magazine Afghanistan-Nytt, organ of the Swedish Afghanistan Committee, a solidarity organization for supporting the Afghan people's resistance against the aggression. (This organization was supported by a quite large number of people in Sweden, including many who considered themselves "left-wing". I joined it in the early 1980s.)What's interesting, among other things, to note here are the terms in which the Soviet social-imperialist chieftains themselves are describing that possible action in Afghanistan which they were later in fact to undertake. Again, those descriptions of events in that country in 1979-1989, by people calling themselves "Marxists", which I'll quote in Chapter 3 should be compared to those judgments on them which appear here, judgments already made in advance, so to speak, by some of the very persons responsible. I reproduce in translation from an article in Afghanistan-Nytt No. 4/94 by Stefan Lindgren [Added in 2008: He in that article brought translations into Swedish from the Russian, and incidentally is now the chairman of our abovementioned organization Föreningen Afghanistansolidaritet, which is protesting against that other and now ongoing aggression against Afghanistan], who reports on the Soviet protocol [comments within square brackets are by me]: THE HERAT UPRISING[Like the "traditional" imperialists, the Soviet revisionists would mix "moral" statements with candid ones. Here of course "impermissible" was the hypocritically "moral" and "it's too risky" the candid.] GROMYKO:[Even one of the leading Soviet revisionists himself was shocked by the vile proposals of those people, or at least pretended to be.] After their meeting with Taraki, [the Soviet revisionist chieftains] Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov and Ponomarev worked out a proposal for a decision by the Politbureau, in which the Afghan leadership were criticized for their suggestion of introducing Soviet troops into the country. This line was an expression of "lack of experience" and "...it has to be held back also in the case of new anti-government actions in Afghanistan".[So far Stefan Lindgren's report on the Soviet revisionists' Politbureau session of 17-19 March 1979. - As is known, those people who held that meeting were to make quite a different decision only nine months later. And the "words of warning" uttered by some of them at that session of course were to be proven "wise" indeed; only, the various imperialists did not always listen to such words yesterday and they will not do so tomorrow either.] Chapter 3: Certain "Marxists" today on events '79-'89A) Opposing standpointsOn the recent execution of Najibullah, one of those people in Afghanistan on whose "political line" even the Soviet revisionist chieftain Kosygin had earlier commented (see Chapter 2): "I cannot understand why this question arises...The question of sending people who would climb into your tanks and shoot on your people. This is a very serious political question.", I wrote to the Jefferson Village Virginia Marxism list on 02.10 i.a. [QUOTE:]This stung one other writer to that list into replying on the same day, giving his own version of what had taken place in Afghanistan in 1979-1989, [QUOTE:]Reading this posting, you might think there wasn't any war at all in Afghanistan during that time - no 1.5 million people killed, no 5-6 million refugees, no 7,000 villages completely destroyed by the invader through helicopter gunship bombing, for instance. What that invader's puppet forces did, according to this writer, was in the main to "institute a system of universal education", "put into effect a labour law", "raise wages", "subsidize petrol" etc etc. - all while the foreign ground and air forces they had begged for on their knees to be sent in were ravaging the country. And "the most important thing of all" they did was a "land reform" - when in fact what was done to agriculture in Afghanistan during the decade in question was its largescale destruction, when in fact the whole country was littered with the enormous amount of anything between 10 and 60 million mines, far more than had been used in any country in any of the world wars and an enormous hindrance to the toiling of the land in Afghanistan for many decades to come too. "Well", he concedes, those puppet forces "made numerous (and highly visible) errors". That's the sum of what he has to say about the Soviet social-imperialists' 10 years long war of aggression and the support of it on the part of their puppets. He doesn't like my reminding people of it today: "The less said" about my "reading of the historical record", "the better". And he's "frankly sickened" by my finding the later execution of one of those Quislings a good thing. "The back of his hand" he gives to me, since I condemned the foreign genocidal aggression and their part in it. B) What's a Quisling? I don't know whether people on all continents of the world are familiar with the term "Quisling". In Europe, and in particular here in Northern Europe, it has been in general use since the great anti-fascist war (World War II) as signifying a particular type of persons held by most people to be among the most despicable of all: One who rules "his" country as an underling to, and by the support of the occupying troops of, a foreign reactionary big power. The term originates from the name of the Norwegian - born in the same country as I, in fact - Vidkun Quisling, who as leader of the insignificant and ridiculous Nazi party "Nasjonal Samling" in the late 1930s made several visits to Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of the big neighbouring aggressive and expansionist power at that time, Germany, to ask him please come and invade his country and so, incidentally, provide him, Quisling, with the support, so sadly lacking on the part of his countrymen, necessary for him to become "Prime Minister" of Norway. It was a similar request, of course, as that made by the Afghan Taraki to the Soviet social-imperialist leaders some 40 years later - cf Chapter 2. Quisling also, as is well known, eventually turned out to be just as "lucky" as later Taraki or at least his colleagues. (I'm not very well-informed on the exact fates of the various Afghan social-imperialist puppets but as far as I remember, Taraki became one of the victims of these colleagues of his even before the Soviet invasion of the country had begun.) Nazi Germany did invade Norway (and also Denmark) by a surprise attack on 09.04.1940 and installed "the original Quisling" as their puppet. Precisely seeing such a particularly vile, ridiculous and despicable creature as "their Prime Minister" it was that in particular angered the Norwegian people into resistance, eventually including armed resistance in the form of sabotage and a budding guerrilla movement, against the occupying Nazi German forces; this touched people to their souls even more than the presence and the actions of those foreign military forces themselves. Even the officers of the invading army themselves were not too fond of this lackey. The commanding German general, von Falkenhorst, when he had gotten military control over Olso, the capital, and Quisling came to him and said that he would now "form a government" of the country, telephoned his boss Hitler and asked: "What am I to do with the fellow? Can I arrest him?" A similar distaste, thus, on the part of the perhaps insufficiently-briefed general, as that (perhaps completely faked? perhaps to some extent genuine?) later expressed by Kosygin to Taraki at the idea of "sending people who would climb into your tanks and shoot on your people". But not even such distaste, for such persons, was in the least hinted at by the above-quoted writer to this Marxism list. On the contrary, he had practically nothing but praise for the Afghan invading-power-puppet "colleagues" of Taraki. It was against me, who condemned them and wrote that they deserved to be killed, that his "moral indignation" was directed. This then is an example of something which experience has shown to turn up again and again: The not only bourgeois, but - when "the moment of truth" arrives - actually arch-reactionary political standpoint of some people who proclaim their adherence to Marxism, their desire for proletarian revolution in the whole world. This is an important point I want to make in this posting: How sharp is the struggle between genuine and phoney Marxism, how absolutely necessary it is clearly to differentiate the one from the other. C) A writer of contradictory words In the case of the writer I've quoted above, he had earlier seemed to represent quite a positive political standpoint. Although a member - as far as I understand - of the utterly revisionist party the "CPUSA", he had, as one of the quite few who did this on an individual basis, endorsed the call for a World Mobilisation Commission to defend the revolution in Peru which was put forward publicly in March of this year. This call for a WMC had a particularly positive significance - or seemed to have so, at least - in that it among other things declared as one task for the proposed Commission really to propagandize and to represent internationally the political line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, which would then have meant, if acted on, the establishment of some sort of genuine international leadership for the proletariat, something which it's of the utmost importance today to achieve. Now as it turned out, the initiators of this call for a WMC, together with an unknown but obviously small number of close friends of theirs, last August went ahead and constituted a "WMC" all by themselves, without bothering about such details as perhaps consulting on this all those other organizations and individuals, in a number of other countries, who had likewise endorsed that call - by which they of course flagrantly went against the whole basic principle of internationalist proletarian democracy and in fact created nothing but a Wrong "Mobilisation Commission", as I publicly pointed out. (I'll return to that subject.) The above-quoted writer responded to this, that he saw no fault whatsoever in that action by those people, and now after I have become aware also of his standpoint concerning the Quislings in Afghanistan and the entire social-imperialist war of aggression against that country, I no longer find this strange. But he for a while had me (and probably others too) fooled into presuming that he was sincere when signing that document (the original call for the WMC), and thus among other things stating his support for the political line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. What was and is the standpoint of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought on the character of the Soviet Union of the last couple of decades, up until its downfall in 1991? As all know, that standpoint consists in pointing out that which is also obvious to all about the character of that state, its completely revisionist and social-imperialist character. As far back as in the late '60s, Mao Zedong clearly pointed out the similar character of the bourgeois dictatorship in the then already long-since degenerated Soviet Union to that of Hitler fascism. [Added in 2008: In fact this was already in 1964. As published later in "Some Interjections At A Briefing In The State Planning Commission Leading Group May 11, 1964", Mao Zedong said: "The Soviet Union today is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the grand bourgeoisie, a fascist German dictatorship, and a Hitlerite dictatorship. They are a bunch of rascals worse than De Gaulle."] So why then did that writer I quoted above sign such a call at all that supported the correct standpoint of Mao Zedong, thus naturally on the character of the Soviet Union too, if he in fact was against that standpoint and in reality condoned such actions by that state as its aggression in Afghanistan? I don't really know. But it's another clear example at least of some people's gladly speaking with double tongues, gladly signing one statement the one day and one in the quite opposite direction the other, if this serves their purposes, whatever more exactly those may be. With Marxism, such behaviour has nothing to do. Such people are frauds - whether more harmful or less, and whether or not they're deceiving themselves too - is another matter. It's absolutely necessary that the actual revolutionaries very clearly differentiate themselves from such people and publicly distance themselves from them. Otherwise they will not get, and will not deserve, any trust on the part of the masses either. D) Excuses for a perhaps not conscious Right-extremism? Can there, in this particular case, be any excuses for the above-quoted writer's writing as he did? On one level, it could perhaps be said that there might be some. I don't hold the silly attempts by the Soviet social-imperialist leaders, supported in this of course by all Western bourgeois media too, to make people believe their state was a "socialist" one, to be much of an excuse for any half-way enlightened person to believe in this. After all, even the Hitler fascists had said they were "socialists" - the very word "Nazis" of course is short for "National-Sozialisten" - and those who knew of at least some of the crimes of those people could by no means be excused by their maintaining that they had actually believed them. But it's possible that the writer in question, a citizen of the USA, had been skeptical to what had been reported by "his" government and "his" bourgeois media about the atrocities of that government's rivaling superpower in Afghanistan. If so, then not wholly without reason. I've seen some "reports" here in Sweden, for instance, on (supposed) events in that country that did seem to be untrue and in fact the result of some CIA fake "advertising". Even so, such skepticism cannot really justify a "belief", by someone in the USA, that there was "no" war of aggression being perpetrated by the social-imperialists in Afghanistan. The standpoint of pretending this remains a morally very degenerate one, even if it in my opinion would have been even worse if the writer had been supporting an aggression by "his own" government and not, as in this case, that of a foreign one, of which "his" imperialist country was (more or less hypocritically) stating its condemnation. The role of the US imperialists in Afghanistan undoubtedly was a murky one too, but nobody could sincerely have believed that it was they who had tens of thousands of troops in the country, bombed the villages there from the air, littered the countryside with an unprecedented number of mines etc etc. Neither were these things done by the largely Moslem-led national resistance, the backward and in part feudalist character of which of course could be no excuse for them either. E) Some more propagandists of aggression Some other writers to the same Marxism list likewise presented matters in approximately the same way as the one I've chosen to quote at length, and/or likewise expressed their moral indignation, not at the social-imperialists' genocidal aggression or their miserable puppets' support for it, but at my condemnation of these crimes. Someone actually wrote that the Soviet social-imperialists had "exerted a civilizing influence" on Afghanistan. If killing 1.5 million people, forcing 5-6 million more to flee, littering the country with mines and destroying 7,000 villages is thought to be an act of "civilizing" a country, what atrocities, in the eyes of that "Marxist", would then be sufficient for him to call them "barbarism"? A couple of people even quoted with approval and satisfaction the opinion of someone or other who had said "if any country deserved to be raped, it was Afghanistan"(!) That at least was a somewhat more candid statement, in the vein of that "declaration of policy" by some US imperialists back in the late 60s in relation to the peoples of Indochina: "We'll bomb'em back to the stone age." (They failed in that too, of course.) [Added in 2008: I later saw another and not less remarkable statement on the social-imperialists' aggression against Afghanistan, by some other people who likewise called themselves "Marxists", and commented on it in Info #302en, "On Pakistan, Afghanistan, A-bombs and oil", of 03.01.2008. It was a Trotskyite organization called "ICL" ("International Communist League"), which in an article in 1998, typically, attacked the acquisition then, by that third-world country, Pakistan, of nuclear weapons, and in that same article, that organization had also written something which I commented on in Info #302en as follows, [QUOTE:] What the abovementioned "ICL" says about the big-power aggression of today against Afghanistan I don't know, but that of yesterday it openly supported - how about these lines which it had in the same abovementioned article, in 1998: "We [the 'ICL', from late 1979 on] proclaimed 'Hail the Red[!!] Army'[!!!] and called to 'extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples.'[!!!] The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous[!!] withdrawal[!!] in 1989 led to the barbaric, anti-women Taliban coming to power in Afghanistan and gave enormous impetus to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere."Precisely turning things upside-down also concerning the causes of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which in reality of course got a big impetus from the aggression, from 1979 on, by Soviet social-imperialism, and certainly not from its troops' finally being forced by the Afghan people to withdraw, which helped in the largescale defeat of that particular big enemy of the peoples in the world too. [END OF QUOTE] So far this addition in 2008.] Is it any wonder, considering that such persons are invariably presented by the openly bourgeois media as "the Communists", that quite a lot of people in several countries today hold the opinion that "Communism means nothing but dictatorship and oppression"? The genuinely Marxist-Leninist forces in the world today are so pitifully few - I'm not saying that they despite this don't hold enormous possibilities in their hands - that it's natural, unfortunately, if many people never heard of any other "Communism" than one or more of those caricatures of it that are rightly known as revisionism or phoney"Marxism". In the next chapter, I shall discuss how this phenomenon, that of revisionism and, as in this case, a revisionism accentuated to the point of its really deserving to be called "Quisling 'Marxism'", may be explained in social terms. Chapter 4: On Quisling "Marxism" and its root causes, on the strange "theory" of "Stalinism" and on the superpowers as rivals and alliesA) The root cause of the revisionist support for the new tsarsWhat are the social causes of such a revisionism, such a completely fake "Marxism", that even wholeheartedly supports the aggression of an imperialist superpower against a third-world country? What was it that made a small number of persons here in Sweden, for instance, extremely friendly towards Soviet social-imperialism - an arch-reactionary power rightly hated and despised by an overwhelming majority of people - even at a time, some 20 years ago, when that power was visibly not only oppressing and exploiting a number of East European peoples but also threatening this country and several other European countries militarily? And still today, there are some purported "Marxists", in various countries, who are weeping over the (partial) downfall of that reactionary power. Why? Can it be blamed on ignorance? To a certain small extent, in some cases, perhaps yes. Under the rule of imperialism, in our time, there is always massive suppression of information to "ordinary people". Thus, those who live in regions of the world very far from the former Soviet Union and not so directly affected by the political and military activities of that power may well have had greater difficulties in seeing through its mask of "socialism". But for people calling themselves "Marxists", ignorance on such a matter cannot be much of an excuse. If you're to become a Marxist and try to guide and lead other people politically, you're obliged, among other things, to inform yourself on the vital matters in the world. And it cannot be said that today, for instance, the utterly reactionary character of the Soviet Union of the last few decades is something that you can miss, if you study Marxism in some way and take a somewhat closer look at world events - no matter in which country you live. The extremely pro-social-imperialist revisionism that was expressed recently, for instance, by some persons writing to the Jefferson Village Virginia Marxism list in the main has a very definite social cause. On this, I'll quote from an article, originally written in 1973 and published in English in 1976, which I intend later to post in full too. [Added in 2008: See Info #041en-rep.] It's a passage from "The International Situation, Europe and the Position of the Marxist-Leninist Parties", written by Klaus Sender, chairman of the KPD/ML (NEUE EINHEIT), Germany, in his exile here in Malmö, Sweden, in 1973; English translation made by me in co-operation with others and published in Britain in 1976 (pp 19-20): "The Soviet Union was formerly a connecting link between the oppressed nations and peoples in the East and the proletarian revolution in the West. It was a fundamental principle of the Soviet Union to give fully equal state rights to the peoples and nations formerly oppressed by the tsar and to aim at developing and promoting these countries in the economic respect as well. But with the establishment of revisionism was also re-erected the old, tsarist, prison for the people of all nationalities."In the social-imperialists' Afghan war, 1979-89, that which was predicted here was confirmed. That power did clash openly with an oppressed people. What Klaus Sender had written about "philistinification and petty-bourgeoisification" eventually came true about him and his party too. In the late 1980s, this earlier so important - though always very small - genuinely proletarian revolutionary force degenerated and turned into that in reality bourgeois force today sometimes posting things on the Net as <klasber@aol.com>. [Added in 2008: In 1997-98, that already degenerated party, the KPD/ML (NEUE EINHEIT), also liquidated itself as a such and was replaced by a likewise swindling phony"Marxist" so-called "Group Neue Einheit", which still exists and which today is publishing statements, sometimes also in English, at the website of the "Verlag [Publishing House] Neue Einheit" at http://www.neue-einheit.com/. Its camouflage is so relatively clever, because of the great knowledge of that earlier existing actually Marxist-Leninist party from which it originates, that I'm recommending others today to read that website. It sometimes may provide many with information on certain matters which otherwise you won't find in many places elsewhere. Only, you should take care of course not to fall into one of the traps of that "group's" leaders, who absolutely are on the side of arch-reaction in the world.] B) The Trotskyite and openly-bourgeois "theory" of "Stalinism" In 1917, there was the great Russian revolution, and in the years immediately following this, the socialist Soviet Union was formed. From the late 1950s on, capitalism was completely restored in the Soviet Union and that former socialist state turned into a pillar of reaction, from which in the mid-1970s even the main danger of largescale imperialist war emanated. These are the most basic facts about the Soviet Union, although things are not quite as simple as stated here in this fashion. From the very beginning, there were certain deformations in this socialist state. And a number of reactionary, revisionist and social-imperialist, actions were undertaken by the Soviet leadership long before the end of the 1950s too. There are several questions of history concerning the first socialist state which still remain open. They need to be investigated. These problems of course have facilitated the continued advocacy of a reactionary "theory" which attacks what it calls "Stalinism". In the abovementioned discussion on the Jefferson Village Virginia Marxism list, some people rightly condemned the aggression against Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, but they said that this aggression was an expression of "Stalinism". Openly bourgeois media have presented things in a similar manner too. But the essentially upside-down character of this description of things is obvious. What was the standpoint of the Soviet revisionists, who perpetrated the aggression in Afghanistan, concerning Stalin? As is well-known, one of the most important turning-points in the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union was the 20th party congress of the CPSU in 1956 and the "secret speech" held by Khrushchov, the first openly revisionist Soviet leader, at that congress, in which he totally repudiated Stalin and tried to blacken him as "completely reactionary". The later revisionist regime under Brezhnev, which was the one mainly responsible for the genocidal aggression against Afghanistan, had made some small modifications in their standpoint concerning Stalin but had by no means stopped supporting their forerunner's condemnation of him. On the other hand, the genuine Marxist-Leninists, i.e. those who adhered to Mao Zedong's correct repudiation of modern revisionism and of Soviet social-imperialism and who of course condemned the aggression of that power in Afghanistan, in the main supported Stalin, while also criticizing his faults. [Added in 2008: See for instance Infos #064en, "Notes on Soviet history (1)" (19.04.1998), part 1/5 etc, #071en, "Notes on Soviet history (2)" (15.06.1998), part 1/3 etc, and #160en, "Revolutionary leaders' errors" (19.01.2002), part 1/2 and part 2/2.] So what people might, with the least justification, be called "Stalinists" in connection with Afghanistan - those who repudiated Stalin and perpetrated the aggression against that country or those who defended him in the main and condemned that aggression? Obviously, only the latter, if the term "Stalinist" is to have any meaning at all. But it's in precisely the contrary way that the Trotskyites and some openly bourgeois media have used that term in this connection. Clearly, their "theory" is an utterly confused one. What's wrong with the term "Stalinism"? Basically, the fact that it doesn't distinguish between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The openly bourgeois media of course never have recognized the fact that the class character of the Soviet Union, at a certain point in its history, changed. The question of more precisely when the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union took place is one on which some different theories might be argued - because of those still unsolved questions of history. But the fact that, in the 1960s at the latest, the former dictatorship of the proletariat in that state had been replaced with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is incontrovertible. The "theory" of "Stalinism", calling the actions of the revisionist regime in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev etc "Stalinist", pretends that that regime had the same basic character as the one under Stalin's leadership, which is untrue. The Trotskyites are using the term "Stalinism" to denote - what? They themselves have always advanced that theory, on the Soviet Union, that it's a "worker's state though with bureaucratic deformations". They have been saying this about the Soviet Union after capitalism in fact was restored in that state too. This is extremely reactionary. It flagrantly goes against the clearly visible facts. Do the Trotskyites with their term "Stalinism" want to denote suppression? So it seems. But there are two quite opposite kinds of suppression, just and unjust. One kind is by a socialist state against counter-revolutionaries, which is just suppression. Another kind is suppression against the masses, which is unjust. Now it's the case that under Stalin's rule, there was a considerable amount of such unjust suppression too, and not only just suppression. Here there are some important questions of history on which much more clarification is needed. But when describing things, you must at least differentiate between the two kinds of suppression. That's what the adherents of Trotsky are not doing. Do they want, by their use of the term "Stalinism", to denote unjustified military intervention? There were some such actions undertaken by the Soviet Union under Stalin. One clear case of it was the assault on Finland in 1939-40. That was in fact a social-imperialist type of war on the part of the Soviet Union, which, nevertheless, had not yet turned into a social-imperialist state. The second war of the Soviet Union against Finland, the one of 1941-44, was a just war on its part, since Finland was then supporting the Hitler fascists' aggression - a support which of course the Soviet Union in part had provoked itself by its earlier unjust action against that country, but anyway. Typical for at least certain trends within Trotskyism too is a tendency to describe the entire World War II as an "imperialist" war, that is, an "unjust" war on the part of "all" the warring parties, though in fact that war of course was in the main an anti-fascist one, with certain imperialist elements involved as a secondary aspect. To call the Soviet revisionists' aggression in Afghanistan a "Stalinist" war is unjustified and misleading too, since the main war actually led by Stalin was a just one, that against the invading Hitler fascists. The fact that the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union also was responsible for certain military actions which must be condemned as unjust is, despite everything, a secondary aspect of that regime. It may be true that this secondary aspect was a rather important one. Very murky do some things seem to be which were done by the Soviet government in 1939-1940 and early 1941 in relation to Hitler fascism. And these things also have a certain prehistory which likewise merits a closer investigation. But still, to call the Soviet revisionists' Afghan war a "Stalinist" one is basically misleading. C) Briefly on the superpowers as rivals and allies In the issue of the last weekend (5-6.10.96) of the US imperialists' newspaper [the] International Herald Tribune, there was an article on Afghanistan (by Philip Bowring on p. 8, "Kabul Reaps a Whirlwind as the World Watches") in which the earlier aggression by the social-imperialists against that country was described as a "Soviet-U.S. proxy war". The present situation was commented on in the following terms: "If Afghanistan is to survive at all as a political entity playing its historical role as a buffer state, some loose, Swiss-style federation seems the only plausible solution. That might have been possible had the Soviet-U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan not been followed by the U.S.-Iranian cold war. For now, however, it is only a dream."Here, obviously, speaks a mouthpiece of another US imperialist faction than that which supported (with or without quotation marks) the Afghan resistance against the social-imperialists. Was that war in essence a "Soviet-U.S. proxy war"? No. It had some elements of such a proxy war in it, but, like the Vietnam war, which some people have likewise tried to make out was such a war, it was in the main an aggression by a foreign reactionary power and a struggle on the part of the people against that aggression. That is, it was mainly a "North-South" conflict, not in the main an "East-West" one. In that recent IHT article is visible the element of superpower partnership, the desire by US imperialism to team up with Russian new tsarism in order to jointly dominate and oppress the rest of the world. Historically, one reason why Soviet social-imperialism became such a grave military threat to a number of European countries some 20 years ago, for instance, was the fact that one faction within US imperialism needed and wanted that - economically much inferior - power as a counterweight against socialist China, in the first place, and also as sword of Damocles, in the second place, against European countries and peoples, in order to "keep them in their place", this not least also because in Europe, there were certain forces at least potentially raising a "threat" of proletarian revolution. As one trait in US imperialist foreign policy, today too, as some 20 years ago, there is - besides that rivalry with Russian new tsarism that still remains - also a tendency to try to use that tsarism as a bullying "bear on a chain" against some European and other countries. One small expression of this was that misleading and in fact more or less condoning description of the new tsars' Afghan war as a "proxy" one. By some writers in the IHT, the fact that the Soviet Union had more than 100,000 own troops in Afghanistan and with its own air force massively bombed the villages in that country, apparently has already been "forgotten". So those "Marxists" who have likewise "forgotten" this fact are in "good company", one might say. They may not have much chance of actually becoming Najibullahs themselves. But they can "comfort" themselves with the fact that their standpoint tallies with that of a not inconsiderable faction within that main reactionary power of today, US imperialism. |
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