Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 2c.6
On SL/PDC Brigade for Kabul Fake-Trotskyists Make
Fake Offer
Reprinted below is a letter from the Bolshevik Tendency to the
Spartacist League regarding a proposal by the SLs Partisan Defense
Committee to organize a combat brigade for Afghanistan:
16 March 1989
Comrades:
The rather bizarre letter from the Partisan Defense Committee
(PDC) to Najibullahs Washington ambassador offering to organize an
international brigade to Kabul (Workers Vanguard 17 February) is notable
for the utter unreality of the proposal. We presume that the masterminds of the
PDC/SL intended their offer to the Peoples Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) as a spectacular (but cheap) method of sidling up to the
tankies in the disintegrating West European Communist Parties. From
a military standpoint there is no reason to imagine that even the combined
might of both the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee
could appreciably affect the balance of forces in Afghanistan. Apparently the
PDPA reached the same conclusion.
The SL leaderships treatment of the Partisan Defense
Committee as an all-purpose mass organization capable of taking
significant initiatives in the international class struggle has a decidedly
fictitious quality. It is hardly a secret that the PDC is essentially the SL/US
in suit and tie. Yet some of your members seem genuinely disoriented by this
ludicrous posturing. At your 24 February forum in Berkeley, SL supporters
estimated that the PDC could mobilize between one and ten thousand (!)
participants for such a venture. In Toronto on March 8, a Spartacist member
announced at a public class that the PDC could probably have recruited a couple
of thousand members for its brigade from Pakistan and India! The Spartacist
League used to criticize the Healyites ruthlessly for creating illusory,
self-contained Potemkin Villages. Today it is engaged in the same kind of
fakery.
Even if we ignore for the moment the absurdity of the PDCs
pretensions of playing a significant military role in Afghanistan, the whole
orientation to the Afghan government is sharply at variance with any claim to
Trotskyism. The proposal explicitly states that the PDC Volunteers would
of course operate under your [Republic of Afghanistan] control and
direction. Quite apart from the dangers posed by the extremely
unfavorable military and political situation created by Gorbachevs
ignominious pull-out, it could have proved extremely physically hazardous for
young militants (or guilt-ridden ex-members) identified with a
Trotskyist organization to place themselves under the control
and direction of the PDPAa Stalinist organization with a history of
bloody purges within its own ranks. Workers Vanguard compares the PDPA
leadership with Kemal Ataturk: let us remind you of the fate of the Turkish
communists at his hands.
The proposed expedition to Kabul recalls the SLs offer of a
dozen defense guards to protect the Democratic Party Convention in
1984. That too was a proposal which was meant to be rejected. There is a
certain cynicism evident in such publicity stunts. The difference between the
two situations is that the PDPA and the secular residents of Kabul are
in genuine physical danger, whereas Mondale, Wallace et. al. were not,
as we pointed out at the time (see Bulletin of
the External Tendency of the iSt, No. 4).
You spent most of the last decade hailing the Soviet
bureaucracys Afghanistan policy. This same bureaucracy is now bitterly
denounced for cold-blooded betrayal. Yet WV (17 February)
still ludicrously refers to Moscows intervention as the one
unambiguously decent and progressive act which the CPSU oligarchs carried
out in the past twenty years. While Trotskyists sided militarily with the
Soviet army against the mujahedin, just as we today militarily support
Najibullahs troops, by now the ambiguity of the Soviet intervention
should be clear even to your most dim-witted member. The reason that it must
still be praised as unambiguously decent and progressive is that
James Robertson, your lider maximo, has put his imprimatur on the
non-Trotskyist slogan of Hail Red Army!, a slogan which, if nothing
else, is unambiguous in its expression of confidence in the policies of the
Soviet rulers.
In a nod to objective reality, the WV article reiterates
this earlier (1980) comment:
Of course, the conservative bureaucrats in the
Kremlin did not send 100,000 troops into Afghanistan to effect a social
revolution, but simply to make secure an unstable, strategically placed client
state....It is possible the Kremlin could do a deal with the imperialists to
withdraw...
How are WV readers supposed to reconcile this with the
assertion, on the same page, that the Soviet intervention went against
the grain of the reactionary Stalinist dogma of socialism in one
country? As we remarked in our letter of 8 April, this is:
...on its face, simply stupid. Was Stalin
going against the grain of Stalinism when he intervened in Finland
in 1939? Or when he decided to expropriate the East European bourgeoisie after
the war? Of course not. On another level though this formulation is perhaps not
so accidental. Those who despair of the historic possibility of the working
class, led by a conscious Trotskyist vanguard, intervening to change the world
have often in the past looked to one or another alternative agency for social
progress. This is the political significance of your inclination to
hail the Stalinist bureaucracy and identify yourselves with
Andropov et al.
As you know, Brezhnev reportedly had to personally override very
considerable opposition at the top of the CPSU to initiate what you consider to
have been the unambiguously decent and progressive act of military
intervention in Afghanistan. With this in mind, perhaps you might have wanted
to dub your hypothetical international expeditionary force the Leonid
Brezhnev Brigade.
Those comrades in the international Spartacist tendency who are
serious about the urgent necessity to struggle to establish Trotskyism as a
mass current in the international proletariat must break from the cynical
posturing of the Robertson gang and join with the Bolshevik Tendency in the
struggle for the Rebirth of the Fourth InternationalWorld Party of
Socialist Revolution.
Fraternally, Bolshevik Tendency |