Defence of October Revolution

The Tankies' Tankies/ 2

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 idea that the PDP's relationship to the army amounted to a class alliance of workers and peasants is sheer fantasy. At every point it is contradicted by the facts - and by the course of events after April 1978. If the PDPA really had won over a sizeable section of...

The Tankies' Tankies/ 1

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). This is a précis of Emine Engin's book "The Revolution in Afghanistan", with a little John-Jackism here and there (most notably, he does not criticise Amin for softness towards Islam, as Engin does…). In the article the typical. all-pervasive characteristics of Karaoke Jack are already rampant. He works by extrapolating from abstractions and from designated values and arbitrary attributions...

Emine Engin and the revolution that never was/ 4

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." Did they? They thought they did, but in fact, they did not. Nothing like it. Or, if the emphasis is on discontented peasants, then self-evidently, not enough peasants were discontented. And there is a qualitative, fundamental, difference between being discontented and being revolutionary. The most striking and revealing features of post-Saur Afghanistan was that they could not...

Emine Engin and the revolution that never was/ 3

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...

Emine Engin and the revolution that never was/ 2

"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." But it is a foolish, self-defeating activity, to argue about Turkish politics and perspectives by way of a convoluted dispute about another country - whose...

Emine Engin and the revolution that never was /1

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. In 1982 the KPT published a small book by Emine Engin on the Stalinist "revolution" in Afghanistan. Jack Conrad/John Bridge, who usually is a karaoke-Leninist - not a translator of Lenin into our conditions, but a frequently unintelligent transcriber of Lenin - is on Afghanistan a transcriber of the work of the Turkish Stalinist, Emine Engin. In the language of...

A coup d'etat?

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). I examine the major work on Afghanistan produced by this tendency, Emine Engin's book, "The Revolution in Afghanistan" (1982); trace Jack Conrad/John Bridge's, leader of the Weekly Worker group, through the 1980s and early 1990s, fantasising, gloating, exhorting, lamenting, and finally mourning over Afghanistan's "Great Saur Revolution" and its aftermath...

The "Great Saur Revolution"

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. 1. The "Great Saur Revolution" was a military coup made by a section of the officer corps of Afghanistan, under the control of the Stalinist party (the PDPA), working in co-ordination with agencies of the neighbouring Russian Stalinist state. 2. The PDPA's decisive class base was a segment of the Afghan ruling elite and of the intelligentsia, which had adopted as its goal the modernisation of Afghanistan on...

The Weekly Worker Group's (CPGB)Turkish Mentors

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 (CPGB) and publishes the Weekly Worker. The group was originally called The Leninist. All its distinctive ideas on Stalinism were picked up from a faction of the Communist Party of Turkey, Workers' Voice, which separated from the Moscow-recognised party at the beginning of the 1980s. Its views were put out in English-language pamphlets and an English-language monthly, "Turkey Today". Workers' Voice...

Under the sign of the oxymoron

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. They were called "Tankies" because, as their critics justly said of them, they believed in a "Russian Tanks Road to Socialism". The Tankies first emerged as a distinct segment of the Communist Party in August 1968, when they loudly supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down Alexander Dubcek's attempt to create "socialism with a human face" there. The CP...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.