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 that do not exist in reality. He makes ropey and even ridiculous analogies - Khalq as the Bolshevik party of Afghanistan! - and then he reasons from the analogy, rather than from the actuality.
Neither in instinct nor thought has he much in common with authentic communism, working-class democracy or Marxism.
To appreciate what follows, it should be kept in mind that he writes when refugees are already numbered in the millions. The dead - who will be perhaps one and a half million before the Russians are driven out - number tens, and, maybe, hundreds of thousands. He is commenting through his fantasist's spectacles on a Russian war of conquest in which the Russians are doing the same as the Americans did in Indochina, the French did during the terrible Algerian war of independence, and the Nazis did during the Second World War in Poland and Russia.
Essentially, he is inserting "revolutionary" fantasies into events generated as epiphenomena of the Russian empire's attempt to annex Afghanistan.
"James Marshall" reports that at a recent conference of the CPGB (the real CPGB: the process in which it dissolved and J-J's group took the name has not yet happened) the Russia-supporting tankies - he calls them "the left" - gained 115 votes. That was 42 % of the delegates, for their amendment against the invasion-condemning Executive, which had 157 votes.
As he will do for another 15 or so years, he depicts a dreamworld version of British politics, where the brain-dead old tankies of the CPGB are "the left", the right-wingers (who at this point in their political evolution are acting as ideological and political powder-monkeys for the Kinnockites in the Labour Party in their war with the class-struggle left) are "centrists", and the whole wretched, withered Stalinist sect that is the CPGB is a communist party, the predesignated vanguard of the working class, towards which "Leninists" are obliged to direct their efforts to build a Leninist organisation in Britain. (The more recent Weekly Worker's talk about "towards a Socialist Alliance party" is a simple transposition of that old orientation onto the SWP and its periphery.)
This dreamworld picture of Britain is part of a world outlook consisting of wilful (or demented) pretence and make-believe about the Stalinist states and what J-J calls "the world communist movement".
With the great upsurge in the Labour Party following its 1979 election defeat, this is in fact one of the most important watershed periods for working-class politics in Britain since the 1920s. To stand aside as the SWP did - telling the Labour Left that nothing could be done because of "the downturn", an idea which in fact Cliff had taken from CPGBers like Eric Hobsbawm, whom ex-left Labour Party aspirant leader Neil Kinnock publicly hailed as his mentor and "the most sagacious" of Marxists - to do that showed that the SWP were unteachable sectarians. But to stand aside because you saw the CP as the working class party showed a wilful disregard for reality that indicated political pathology!
Through the 80s and long after, J-J would classify others on the left, such as ourselves, according to our attitudes to the Labour Party and to their CP. If you were in the Labour Party, ipso facto, you were a reformist and an anti-communist.
So J-J finds the tankies' large vote against the CP executive good. But he is disturbed. Right at the beginning, he differentiates himself from the other tankies, by insisting, after Emine Engin, that Afghanistan's "Saur" revolution was a popular revolution and not a coup.
"[Attitudes to] Soviet intervention dominated the debate on Afghanistan at the 1981 Party Congress [but] the nature of the Afghan revolution and the ideological differences in its leadership were buried beneath a thick layer of mythology The left of the Congress found themselves in the paradoxical situation where it was they, not our 'home grown' right-opportunists, who lauded right-opportunism in Afghanistan [that is, the Parchamis put in power to be their Quislings by the Russians]. They perpetrated the myth that Amin's leadership of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was 'tyrannical' and that the PDPA launched a wave of 'terrorism' against the people and even that Amin himself was [as the USSR insists] a 'CIA agent' [Thus] the left found themselves trapped in the deadly pit of centrism
"We Leninists fully support aid from the Soviet Union to the Afghan Revolution, both economic and military."
J-J knows the fundamental thing about the Afghan coup of 1978:
"Without the existence of the Soviet Union the revolution in Afghanistan would either have never taken place or its life would be countable in months, if not weeks "
Next sentence: he contradicts what he has just said about the centrality of Russia for the Afghan "revolution" and asserts the opposite, that the "revolution" would have been viable and had a power and dynamic of its own, which the Russians smothered.
"This said we consider the killing of Amin and 97 other PDPA leaders as representing the extinguishing of the flame of the revolution; this was not only a crime, but also deforms the development of the country."
The "flame of the revolution" has been extinguished. The Russians can nonetheless secure the revolution that they extinguished:
"The presence of large numbers of Soviet Army units can secure it from the clutches of imperialism".
Securing it from the people of Afghanistan may prove more difficult:
"The threat of counter-revolution welling up from the depths of society is, in the long term, a constant danger, much in the manner experienced in Poland in the last three decades."
This is a major theme of J-J's. He will warn against "democratic counter-revolution" in various Stalinist states until the final collapse of European Stalinism in 1991.
He offers an account of how the Khalqi revolution had come about:
"Despite a bourgeois 'revolution' [that is, Daud's 1973 coup] the tasks of the bourgeois revolution still remained to be carried out. Despite its tiny size it was the working class that stepped forward".
Where? When? Which working class? Marshall knows that on the facts this is utter nonsense; but don't worry, it is all a matter of definitions. He is a Stalinist "internationalist":
"It was the working class that stepped forward because of its power internationally".
Though this is terribly vague, it is a sort of acknowledgement of the centrality of the Russian dimension. In fact he doesn't mean, or pretend to mean, that the real working class in Afghanistan - or anywhere else, for that matter - did anything at all. Its substitutes, in Afghanistan and in the USSR, did it. In his reasoning, and that of his Workers' Voice mentors, substitute and working class are the same thing. There is no difference at all between the working class and a "Communist" Party like the Afghan PDPA - or, if there is a difference, it is a matter of the shortcomings of working-class spontaneity. Question that, and you sink to base economism.
"It was the working class that stepped forward because of its power internationally. Through its party, the PDPA, which was leading other oppressed sections such as the peasants [!!!], the urban petty-bourgeoisie, the minority nationalities - and championing the rights of women, it thus established hegemony over the national democratic revolution".
His perspective on the Afghan "democratic revolution" is that the Stalinist party should gain power and keep it as the revolution is taken through a succession of stages culminating in "socialism". "Hegemony" here means nothing but state power, a monopoly of force. In other articles, as Russia prepares to pull out, after a savage nine-year colonial war, he will be brutally specific on this point.
"Democracy" here has nothing in common with its meaning to us, or to Lenin. Where the Party rules, that is democracy!
The fate of the Afghan Stalinist regime was determined by the fact that though it had power in the main towns and controlled the state, the PDPA was unable to carry through even the most basic task of the "bourgeois democratic revolution", land reform, or indeed, outside a few towns, any other of the measures Marshall lists. But we are, remember, not dealing with Afghan reality, but with an ideal type of Stalinist revolution.
A question about John-Jack, his mind and his methods arises here. He writes about Khalq leading the peasants. What can be in his mind? Is he innocently and foolishly, but according to his lights honestly, reading off an assessment from the identity he has asserted to exist between the Russian Bolsheviks and Khalq and the Bolsheviks' alliance with the revolutionary Russian peasantry in October 1917? Is he utterly confused, or is he, knowingly, a blatant liar?
The fundamental fact of Afghanistan after the April coup was that the new regime had negligible support outside a very narrow base amongst sections of the intelligentsia and of the military in the towns. These facts were well known by the time James Marshall wrote his piece. For example, I told the true story in our paper, Workers' Action, in a series of articles in January 1980.
J-J goes on to provide a selective history of Afghan Stalinism.
"The PDPA was founded in January 1965 The PDPA split in June 1967. Parcham was led by Karmal, and advocated co-operating with the 'left' in the feudal regime; Khalq, under the leadership of Taraki (and despite his desire to conciliate with Parcham) pursued a consistent principled position, mainly as a result of the efforts of Amin."
The glorification of Amin at the expense of Taraki is a literal reproduction of Amin's own account after he had bumped off Taraki late in 1979. It is hagiography that differs from the version of the same thing you'd get in the New Communist Party's New Worker, glorifying Russia's puppet Karmal, only in that independent selection preceded the hagiography.
"The tailist policies of Parcham were fully exposed by the Daud coup, when four Parcham ministers were appointed to placate the masses and to provide a 'left' cover Although Khalq had vacillated in their attitude towards Daud [in fact Khalq had tried to join the Daud Government] Khalq [soon] advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal/bourgeois regime and its replacement by a popular alliance led by the workers [!!!] which would eventually lead the country to socialism."
The "popular alliance led by the workers" was the Turks' formula for revolution in Turkey.
Coming to describe Saur, J-J lies, misrepresents and fantasises:
"The two factions of the PDPA reunited in July [1977] [The Khalq military organisation] was headed by Amin [and] had been steadily growing in size, effectiveness and dynamism. For Amin it represented a central part of his entire strategic plan for revolution in the country. The Armed Forces, consisting mainly of peasants and staffed by the urban petty bourgeoisie, could - with the intervention of the PDPA - be split, and a large section won to the side of revolution. Amin's work in the army was therefore central in building the revolutionary alliance of the masses, under the leadership of the working class through its party - the PDPA".
Here, in carefully not specifying which parts of the armed forces were won over, and how and why, J-J does what we have seen Engin doing, wilfully misrepresenting what happened. A Marxist, or just someone possessing average integrity, would feel obliged to be concrete and specific here. But J-J is only spinning "the line" according to the Turks.
Neither the whole nor any part of the working class which, according to Marshall. "through its party" gained the leadership of a "revolutionary alliance of the masses", played any part at all in the event being described, the April 1978 coup. Even if one were to accept the preposterous identification of the middle and upper class PDPA with the Afghan or the international working class - and to formulate it in words is to underline how outlandish the idea is - no such "revolutionary alliance of the masses" ever came into existence!
The Afghan working class was scarcely in evidence even as a small proportion of the membership of "its party", which was in fact an organisation of the urban and military elite. Nobody could accuse the PDPA of being proletarian-oriented "economists"!
Here John-Jack has slipped, by way of constructive lies, vapid pieties and crazy substitutionism, from real Afghanistan and what actually happened there, into an imaginary Afghanistan, which is a place of ideal models and biddable fantasies. He talks about the peasants in the army in order to suggest, without saying it plainly, that it was amongst them that the PDPA worked, or mainly worked. No it wasn't!
