The Soviet Occupation of Afganistan [Archive]

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Vyacheslav Brolotov

18th February 2012, 20:09

Prometeo liberado

18th February 2012, 20:37

I think what the Soviet expedition into Afghanistan really helped expose was the increasing degeneration of the soviet leadership and by extension its people/troops. As the commitment in Afghanistan began to deepen so to did the pool of conscripts from which the once great Red Army have to draw from. No longer would the front line professional troops be the sole representative on the battlefield. These new conscripts were drawn from a greater representation of the under/unemployed youth. Often prone to drunkenness and lacking discipline they were seen as nothing more than cannon fodder. Thrown into Afghanistan with little military training, let alone cultural training they were a disaster waiting to happen. What initially started out as cooperation with it's Afghan allies quickly degenerated into crisis management 101 as fresh troops created a rebellious population through indiscriminate mass murder and rape. Foreign policy was being rewritten and a friendly population was to turn on its own. It was a sobering up for the Soviet leadership that something was really wrong in the country and things would never be the same.

Vyacheslav Brolotov

18th February 2012, 20:50

Grenzer

18th February 2012, 21:02

How can something be imperialist and be a good decision? Just curious.

Vyacheslav Brolotov

18th February 2012, 21:05

How can something be imperialist and be a good decision? Just curious.

Well, in the sense of realpolitik, some people might think it was a good idea. Idk why any leftist would think that, but whatever.

A Marxist Historian

18th February 2012, 21:27

Was the Soviet Occupation of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan imperialist? Keep in mind that there were documents (1978 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness) prior to the introduction of Soviet troops to Afghanistan that allowed the Afghan government to call for Soviet aid, which they did numerous times. Not only did the Soviets help the government fight the precursors to modern Islamic terrorists, but they also helped the Afghan people by supporting the killing of a terrible Afghan leader and possible collaborator with the capitalist West, Hafizullah Amin. The problem that some anti-imperialists have with the Soviet occupation of Democratic Afghanistan is what happened during the war. The Soviet army commonly destroyed villages and houses, killing many honest Afghans (though they were not as violent as the Americans in Vietnam). They also put the Afghan government and military on the sidelines and made the struggle against counterrevolution their own. Another problem with the Soviet occupation is that it actually inflamed the situation. It caused more people to join the counterrevolution for explainable nationalist reasons.
Despite all this, the Soviets had no real economic incentives in controling Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been historically known to have little profitable natural resources and the Soviets already had the resource-rich Central Asian Republics. And the arguement that the Soviets did this for expansionist reasons is just not true. Even if they did spread their influence to Afghanistan, the Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Pakistanis, and even Indians (although they supported the occupation) would have not let them get any farther in expansion. Personally, I agree with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as a necessary struggle against counterrevolution and the imperialist support for the terroristic opposition, but not as pragmatic option for the Soviet Union. They were just making matters worst and ultimately hurting themselves. This one of the few times in the Soviet Union's late history that I believe that the Stalinist doctrine of Socialism in One Country should have superceded the Brezhnev Doctrine (considering that I believe that Socialism in One Country is only a good doctrine in new and developing socialist nations). In short, I believe that it was not an imperialist occupation, but also not an intelligent choice. Please give your opinions on the matter. Thank you.

The actual reason for the occupation was the fear, justified as it much later turned out, that Islamic reaction on the march could spread to Soviet Central Asia. There was a lot of rhetoric in the Politburo minutes from Brezhnev et. al. about how this was just socialist internationalism, but that was the real reason.

Sort of like Abraham Lincoln going to war with the South. The purpose was not to free the slaves, despite all Lincoln's anti-slavery rhetoric, but that in fact is what happened. So for a while, the women of Afghanistan were freed from medieval slavery. Very supportable!

This was in fact a deviation to some degree from the usual Stalinist conception of "socialism in one country," and therefore a very good thing. The Afgantsy could have been organized as a resistance to capitalist restoration in the USSR, against traitors like Gorbachev.

The problem with the intervention was that the USSR did not stay the course. They stayed long enough for the Najibullah regime to be strong enough to hold off and maybe even defeat the Mujahedeen, as was proven in the heroic and successful defense of Jalalabad *after* the Soviet withdrawal.

Were it not, of course, for the huge imperialist campaign of aid to the ultra-reactionary Mujahedeen, the largest CIA operation in the entire history of the CIA. Focused on that CIA base, Tora Bora, that Osama Bin Laden built for them, which he later took over when he had his falling out with the US and dropped off the CIA payroll.

But after the Soviet Union collapsed and Yeltsin immediately cut off all aid whatsoever, the Najibullah regime only lasted another 6 months or so.

If Soviet troops had stayed there instead of withdrawing, the Mujahedeen could have been crushed, and not only would Afghanistan be vastly better off, so would the Soviet Union, as the Soviet withdrawal in '89 opened the floodgates to first the collapse of Eastern Europe, and then of the USSR itself.

-M.H.-

Prometeo liberado

18th February 2012, 22:39

A Marxist Historian

19th February 2012, 04:36

My point was, and it's my fault for not being clearer, that in this instance the expedition was not at first imperialist in nature. Define imperialism as you wish but for this argument in no way can you define the initial military venture as imperialist. Only after the debacle began to unfold and local support turned to others for help did it become classic imperialism.

For Marxist, imperialism means economic exploitation of one country by another, as economics is always the key.

The form it takes can vary, from the classic Roman imperialism where Rome just taxed all its colonies to death, to the modern form of capitalist imperialism with the export of capital to the Third World to extract monopoly superprofits through superexploitation of workers in miserable sweatshops. And a lot of others too in between.

Since the USSR gave economic assistance to Afghanistan, rather than extracting anything from it, there is no way scientifically this can be considered imperialism by any Marxist.

-M.H.-

Tovarisch

19th February 2012, 19:45

How can something be imperialist and be a good decision? Just curious.
It's possible. For example, Vietnam used imperialist force to control the shit out of Cambodia. However, by taking control of Cambodia, Vietnam crushed the oppressive Khmer Rouge, and established a much more fair government in its place

Its disgusting that USA supported a terrible regime such as Khmer Rouge. But I guess they were still hurt from the fact that Vietnam outsmarted them in the jungles

Tavarisch_Mike

19th February 2012, 19:55

It's possible. For example, Vietnam used imperialist force to control the shit out of Cambodia. However, by taking control of Cambodia, Vietnam crushed the oppressive Khmer Rouge, and established a much more fair government in its place

Its disgusting that USA supported a terrible regime such as Khmer Rouge. But I guess they were still hurt from the fact that Vietnam outsmarted them in the jungles

Aaaand they also supported the reactionary, religeus-fundametalist, former landlords we know as the Talibans! that tried to take back the power from the 'reds'. Worth remmembering.

Prometeo liberado

19th February 2012, 20:13

I definitely over spoke myself when I said that "Only after the debacle began to unfold and local support turned to others for help did it become classic imperialism.". In fact what it became was a political and military quagmire. To compare it to the US involvement in Vietnam would be a bit misleading. Unlike South Vietnam, Afghanistan showed no promise for economic colonization. Short or long term.So to restate my original statement I would now say "Only after the Soviet military degenerated from within did the expedition begin to show imperialist militaristic tendencies."

GoddessCleoLover

19th February 2012, 20:40

I see the Soviet occupation more as a policy blunder based upon the fears of a spread of Islamic fundamentalism into Soviet central Asia as posted by A Marxist Historian. Ironically, the occupation exacerbated rather than ameliorated the situation with respect to Soviet central Asia. IMO had the Soviet Union escalated the level of combat to the point where they might have "crushed" the Mujahadin, my view is that the long-term ramifications would have been to make the Union and the Soviet peoples the target of revenge terroristic attacks for decades if not centuries.

manic expression

19th February 2012, 21:10

It wasn't imperialist and it was the only sensible decision left. The progressive government of Afghanistan was pleading for military aid, and the CIA had been in the country for months. It was an act of true internationalism to aid Afghan sisters and brothers in a struggle of self-defense.

More than that, it was successful. Never let anyone lie to you and say it wasn't, because it was. Benazir Bhutto's little fiasco at Jalalabad is enough to know the Soviet Union accomplished its mission.

Grenzer

19th February 2012, 22:31

manic expression

19th February 2012, 22:47

It seems like the pro invasion people are on very shaky ground. A lot of the points and reasoning used in this thread could be equally applied to support the US invasion of Afghanistan and to a lesser degree, the broader "War on Terror."
How so, exactly? The government of Afghanistan never invited the US to militarily take control of the country. The Soviet Union, by any rational definition, launched an intervention, not an invasion.

It doesn't fit the bill of Lenin's Imperialism, I don't doubt that; but it seems as though that is not the only definition of Imperialism. Some consider things like "Cultural Imperialism" to be a form of Imperialism as well, and I have seen many Marxists criticize the Western powers for doing similar things.

Take the "Race for Africa" for example. There certainly were areas that the Colonial Powers wanted to control for economic purposes, but there were also many areas they fought over that had absolutely no economic or political significance at all. Some of the statements I've seen in this thread are remarkably similar to arguments made by reactionary historian Niall Ferguson in justifying British colonialism and the "White Man's Burden."
OK, but remember that the Soviet Union was responding to the repeated requests for aid from Afghan progressives. They weren't imposing their will on the country because they felt they had to "civilize" the country, they went in to fight the threat posed by the CIA and their right-wing fundamentalist pawns. At stake was the progress made by workers, women, artists and so many others in the face of reaction. So by defending an indigenous progressive movement, and ultimately handing over (actual) power to them when their military objective had been accomplished, the USSR did the opposite of what colonialism did and is doing today.

To be clear, I am very against religious fundamentalism and see it as a growing problem in certain parts of the world today, but is this the best way to handle it? It seems a lot like saying "By embracing fundamentalism, these people have shown themselves incapable of governing themselves, so we're going to go in and force them to follow what we want them to do."
On the contrary, the uprising of fundamentalist elements showed that imperialism was pulling strings in order to destroy the progressive government, and that Afghanistan's self-determination itself was under threat.

If the Soviet Union didn't lend aid to a progressive government that was requesting its support...how could it possibly call itself internationalist? The only progressive thing to do was to respond and fight on behalf of the Afghan masses and on behalf of Afghan sovereignty.

Prometeo liberado

20th February 2012, 00:00

We may be arguing two different points here. The reasoning behind the initial expedition and the reality of what it became years into it are two different things. The Soviet Union and The Afghan government had a mutual aid agreement in word if not in writing. The principals of internationalism are very relevant here and do lay the basis for one communist country to seek aid from another. Comparisons to the US invasion of Afghanistan hold little water though. First off, with the Soviet expedition you had an established government that was not being replaced by the Soviets, but was being attempted to be overthrown by covert CIA paid fundamentalist. With the US invasion the premise was the" War on Terror". But actually nothing more than nation building meant to prop up another US friendly client state in the area. The US invaded a country, not to aid, but to destroy an existing country in order to replace it.
The other point seems to be an interpretation of what became of the Soviet expedition. With the help of international Islamic fundamentalism and millions if not billions of dollars poured into creating an armed conflict the Soviets and their Afghan comrades were drawn into a prolonged land war in an asiatic country known to be unforgiving for that type of conflict. The Soviets already reeling from stagnation of the economy as well as an inebriated conscript could only do so much. The CIA benefited from no lack of resources as Israel, Saudi Arabia and others matched the US dollar for dollar in funds and arms for the mujaheddin. Couple the Islamic fanaticism of the Taliban with the low morale of the Red Army and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. And it did.

GoddessCleoLover

20th February 2012, 00:07

Except that the Soviets were not invited in by the Afghani party, rather they invaded and in the course of that invasion murdered Hafizullah Amin (who in turn had murdered the leader of the April Revolution, Nur Muhammad Taraki) who was the de jure leader of Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was yet another stain on its record, and disengagement was on of the few bright spots of the Gorbachev era.

Grenzer

20th February 2012, 00:14

How so, exactly? The government of Afghanistan never invited the US to militarily take control of the country. The Soviet Union, by any rational definition, launched an intervention, not an invasion.

Firstly, this is a matter of semantics. Just as a war is no less a war for being called a "Peace-keeping operation." The definition of invasion in the dictionary states that it is an armed incursion. That's precisely what the Soviets did. Also, why the hell should it matter whether they were "invited" by the government of Afghanistan? The Afghan government was deeply unpopular and by no stretch of the imagination representative of the workers and peasants of Afghanistan. In other words, the government was illegitimate; so their "invitation" was likewise meaningless. The government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan came to power through a blanquist coup, not a genuine proletarian revolution.

OK, but remember that the Soviet Union was responding to the repeated requests for aid from Afghan progressives. They weren't imposing their will on the country because they felt they had to "civilize" the country, they went in to fight the threat posed by the CIA and their right-wing fundamentalist pawns. At stake was the progress made by workers, women, artists and so many others in the face of reaction. So by defending an indigenous progressive movement, and ultimately handing over (actual) power to them when their military objective had been accomplished, the USSR did the opposite of what colonialism did and is doing today.

Again, I think the key is stressing that, for the most part, those demanding intervention were in a small minority and tended to be urban intelligentsia rather than workers. I actually agree with you that in the short term, the benefits would be beneficial to the population; but again, I believe that this essentially amounts to Blanquism and counter-revolution in the long run. Even if begun with the best of intentions, without actually being representative of those beneath them, the power clique in charge will degenerate into a bourgeois dictatorship. It also seems to be an idealist assumption that the Soviet Union would intervene sheerly out of altruism to defend a "indigenous progressive movement" as you say. What seems more likely is that they were concerned about the growing instability of the regions just beyond their border and the possibility of fundamentalism spreading to regions with significant Muslim populations such as Chechnya.

On the contrary, the uprising of fundamentalist elements showed that imperialism was pulling strings in order to destroy the progressive government, and that Afghanistan's self-determination itself was under threat.

I'm not sure how a native swelling of religious extremism shows that "imperialism was pulling the strings." My take on the rise of religious extremism is that it is less about religion, and more about being a form of nationalistic reaction. I personally doubt that religious extremism would be growing the way it is if the mullahs didn't have the stick of Western imperialism and intervention to scare people with.

In addition, why should we care about self-determination at the level of a nation-state? I'm sure most of us would agree that nationalism is not only counter-productive to class struggle and the goal of proletarian revolution, but is reactionary and counter-revolutionary.

If the Soviet Union didn't lend aid to a progressive government that was requesting its support...how could it possibly call itself internationalist? The only progressive thing to do was to respond and fight on behalf of the Afghan masses and on behalf of Afghan sovereignty.

Indeed, how could a capitalist/state capitalist/degenerated workers' state/revisionist state/whatever the fuck you want to call it call itself internationalist? Well the simple answer is that no such state could under any circumstances claim that its actions are a form of international solidarity with the working class. It seems bizarre to me that you would even bring this up as I believe that there is a near unanimous agreement on this board that the Soviet Union at this time was not a socialist state. And again, fuck Afghan nationalism, along with every other form. It's confusing to me that Leninists still insist on adhering to Lenin's position on the National Question when history has proven time and time again that "self-determination" in this context is synonymous with nationalism, and is inherently counter-revolutionary.

We appear to have a disagreement on tactics. I understand where you're coming from and can respect your opinion, but I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Zulu

21st February 2012, 02:19

Grenzer

21st February 2012, 03:22

I say imperialism, but good decision. Or, to be more precise: the net effects of this purely geopolitical decision by the Soviet revisionists were good. The primary motivation had nothing to do with spreading communism and supporting the people of Afghanistan. But residual internationalist policies remained (even if for the simple "win hearts and minds" reasons), the Soviets helped to build schools and hospitals, educate people, and so on. And, of course, there were no poppy plantations during that time.

And how many of these things are around today?

None, which essentially amounted to the Soviet Invasion being completely meaningless. The Taliban immediately closed the schools, reverted to the same ultra-reactionary religious education, ended women's rights, and without external funding, the hospitals closed.

It will difficult for positive permanent change to be achieved in Afghanistan. They have a small proletariat, and a large number of peasants. As we are aware, peasants tend to be deeply reactionary in many ways. Until Afghanistan becomes more industrialized, there is not much of a working class to show solidarity with and build class consciousness, which in my opinion should be the basis for positive change away from religious fundamentalism and towards socialism. I have a feeling that Afghanistan will be a problematic region for decades to come, perhaps longer.

Zulu

21st February 2012, 04:11

And how many of these things are around today?

None, which essentially amounted to the Soviet Invasion being completely meaningless. The Taliban immediately closed the schools, reverted to the same ultra-reactionary religious education, ended women's rights, and without external funding, the hospitals closed.

Is this supposed to be the argument against the occupation? To me it seems more like an argument for continued occupation. By the way, it ended not because it was itself a total disaster, but because the entire Soviet Union was sliding into a total disaster due to the earlier mistakes.

Ostrinski

21st February 2012, 04:15

Certainly imperialist, but whether or not it was good or bad depends on what side of the conflict you were on.

Lev Bronsteinovich

21st February 2012, 04:33

Grenzer

21st February 2012, 04:50

Is this supposed to be the argument against the occupation? To me it seems more like an argument for continued occupation. By the way, it ended not because it was itself a total disaster, but because the entire Soviet Union was sliding into a total disaster due to the earlier mistakes.

It's an argument against it. I'm stating that the gains that were achieved through the occupation could only have been sustained for as long as Soviet troops and funding remained there, in addition to it being a flawed position in the first place.

A Marxist Historian

21st February 2012, 09:52

It seems like the pro invasion people are on very shaky ground. A lot of the points and reasoning used in this thread could be equally applied to support the US invasion of Afghanistan and to a lesser degree, the broader "War on Terror." It doesn't fit the bill of Lenin's Imperialism, I don't doubt that; but it seems as though that is not the only definition of Imperialism. Some consider things like "Cultural Imperialism" to be a form of Imperialism as well, and I have seen many Marxists criticize the Western powers for doing similar things.

Take the "Race for Africa" for example. There certainly were areas that the Colonial Powers wanted to control for economic purposes, but there were also many areas they fought over that had absolutely no economic or political significance at all. Some of the statements I've seen in this thread are remarkably similar to arguments made by reactionary historian Niall Ferguson in justifying British colonialism and the "White Man's Burden."

To be clear, I am very against religious fundamentalism and see it as a growing problem in certain parts of the world today, but is this the best way to handle it? It seems a lot like saying "By embracing fundamentalism, these people have shown themselves incapable of governing themselves, so we're going to go in and force them to follow what we want them to do."

A Marxist Historion's statement actually seems nearly identical to those made by David Petraeus in justifying "The Surge." It brings to mind an article I read about many ex-Trotskyists joining the Neo-Liberal camp in the late 1970's and formulating the basis of George Bush's foreign policy. I'm not making a statement about Trotskyists, but it is a bit humorous to notice the parallels.

It seems to be very much a grey issue and I haven't really decided a stance on this, but it's interesting to read the rest of you have to say. It is an interesting and troubling trend that even as the crises of capitalism grow and class consciousness with it, religious fundamentalism is also on the rise, and not just in under industrialized countries. This discussion seems particularly relevant with this in mind.

Marxists are materialists, culture is superstructure. Any sort of "cultural imperialism" is just a superstructure over the real thing.

Can any of my reasoning be used to support US intervention in Afghanistan? Well, being as the prime US intervention was to drive the USSR out and put the Mujahedeen, ancestors of the Taliban, in power, that's absurd.

The US went into Afghanistan primarily for revenge vs. 9/11. Americans wanted to kill as many Muslims as possible, preferably ones with some sort of connection with Osama, the US Frankenstein's monster, but not necessarily. All else was secondary.

The claims that the US was going in there to rescue the Afghans from medieval backwardness, save the women etc., were simply hogwash. Anybody with any knowledge of facts on the ground in Afghanistan knows that. The US is simply supporting Karzai's faction of the old Mujahedeen, the opium growing warlords, instead of the religious fanatic faction.

Whereas when the USSR was running things, yes, women were going to school. Even the New York Times said, when the Mujahedeen rebellion started in 1980, that this was the first war in history where the main issue was womens' rights. The Mujahedeen saw women learning to read and write as against Islam.

Know what the great reform Karzai implemented for womens' rights was? There is a law in Afghanistan according to which women who commit adultery get stoned to death. Well, Karzai changed it. Now ... you are supposed to use smaller stones.

To put it simply, when the USSR went into Afghanistan, women were liberated. Rhetoric to one side, whenever the US or another capitalist imperialist power intervenes in a foreign country, people are enslaved.

It's simply the difference between good and evil. The USA really is the heart of "the evil empire." The belly of the beast, as Guevara put it.

Why is this? Because the US is capitalist, and the USSR was not, though it had other problems. So foreign intervention by the USSR was not automatically exploitative (and in this particular case wasn't), as all foreign interventions by a capitalist power in our era of capitalist imperialism must always be.

-M.H.-

Zulu

21st February 2012, 10:05

The US went into Afghanistan primarily for revenge vs. 9/11.

No. The primary goal was to turn Afghanistan into a one huge poppy farm. The Taliban began burning poppy on moral grounds (and on the UN's request, to be admitted) a year prior to the US-led invasion. Now the heroin output is dozens of times higher than before the war. It's basically a Central Asian Columbia now.

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9558/poppyc.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/204/poppyc.jpg/)

.

l'Enfermé

21st February 2012, 10:16

It wasn't altruistic, but it was would have been more benificial to the Afghan people if the CIA and their Islamist allies in Pakistan, the Saud Dynasty, etc, didn't train, fund, arm and direct the Muj. The Soviets were backing the urban-based, secular, democratic, progressive elements of Afghan society, the opposition was backing the rural-based, Islamic fundamentalist reactionaries that are threatend by women learning the alphabet. We also musn't forget that the Soviet forces didn't just invade Afghanistan out of the blue, they only sent their forces in after the Afghan government literally begged them many times to do it.

But the reaction of the Soviets to severe opposition by the Mujs. is another thing.

manic expression

21st February 2012, 11:45

It's an argument against it. I'm stating that the gains that were achieved through the occupation could only have been sustained for as long as Soviet troops and funding remained there, in addition to it being a flawed position in the first place.
That's not at all a proven assertion. The whole point was to support the PDPA in reforms already being initiated...they did not occur because of the Soviet intervention, they were merely defended by it.

Yehuda Stern

21st February 2012, 14:19

Like I wrote in another thread:

Quite the contrary. The Soviets invaded exactly in order to paralyze the progressive wing of the PDPA and halt any sort of uprising. The first thing they did was to assassinate the left-wing leader of the PDPA and install in his place one of their puppets. This also led to rapprochement with the most reactionary elements of the Islamists - the mullahs had their first ever conference in Afghanistan under the auspices of the USSR occupation government.

Grenzer

21st February 2012, 15:40

Marxists are materialists, culture is superstructure. Any sort of "cultural imperialism" is just a superstructure over the real thing.

Can any of my reasoning be used to support US intervention in Afghanistan? Well, being as the prime US intervention was to drive the USSR out and put the Mujahedeen, ancestors of the Taliban, in power, that's absurd.

The US went into Afghanistan primarily for revenge vs. 9/11. Americans wanted to kill as many Muslims as possible, preferably ones with some sort of connection with Osama, the US Frankenstein's monster, but not necessarily. All else was secondary.

The claims that the US was going in there to rescue the Afghans from medieval backwardness, save the women etc., were simply hogwash. Anybody with any knowledge of facts on the ground in Afghanistan knows that. The US is simply supporting Karzai's faction of the old Mujahedeen, the opium growing warlords, instead of the religious fanatic faction.

Whereas when the USSR was running things, yes, women were going to school. Even the New York Times said, when the Mujahedeen rebellion started in 1980, that this was the first war in history where the main issue was womens' rights. The Mujahedeen saw women learning to read and write as against Islam.

Know what the great reform Karzai implemented for womens' rights was? There is a law in Afghanistan according to which women who commit adultery get stoned to death. Well, Karzai changed it. Now ... you are supposed to use smaller stones.

To put it simply, when the USSR went into Afghanistan, women were liberated. Rhetoric to one side, whenever the US or another capitalist imperialist power intervenes in a foreign country, people are enslaved.

It's simply the difference between good and evil. The USA really is the heart of "the evil empire." The belly of the beast, as Guevara put it.

Why is this? Because the US is capitalist, and the USSR was not, though it had other problems. So foreign intervention by the USSR was not automatically exploitative (and in this particular case wasn't), as all foreign interventions by a capitalist power in our era of capitalist imperialism must always be.

-M.H.-

Your entire argument seems to presuppose that because the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist, that it's actions were somehow more appropriate. This seems ridiculous frankly, in addition to this, the USSR WAS capitalist. It used the capitalist mode of production; it seems like the qualifier many here use is whether there was formal private property. You need to go back and read Marx again and note the emphasis on social relations of production. Trotsky had a very bone headed analysis of the Soviet Union, which I would attribute to his emotional attachment to it; and I would probably venture that this is what prevented him from making a rational analysis, it's also possible that he just was a poor Marxist; but from the quality of some of his previous things I would venture to say that it was the former rather than the latter.

So, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan because they are awesome people and truly had the concern of the Afghan people in mind. Who were the materialists here again?

This invasion was conducted by a capitalist country, and did not advance class struggle one iota. By virtue of the latter alone, it was worse than useless. What you essentially seem to be suggesting is that we can achieve positive permanent change without revolution as the basis, which is at best, reformist.

Grenzer

21st February 2012, 15:48

That's not at all a proven assertion. The whole point was to support the PDPA in reforms already being initiated...they did not occur because of the Soviet intervention, they were merely defended by it.

I fail to see how it's an unproven assertion given the government was illegitimate and the population pretty much fucking hated it. The government came into power by a coup, not a revolution. As the state of the Taliban for the last few decades has proven, only continued and sustained foreign intervention can prop up a puppet, and even then with difficulty.

I already went on in detail as to why a coup is not a substitute for a revolution, and why the government that results from such a coup cannot be the basis for permanent positive change. This discussion seems to be going in a circle, so I suppose I will leave you gentlemen alone to extol the virtues of adventurism and chauvinism.

manic expression

21st February 2012, 16:17

I fail to see how it's an unproven assertion given the government was illegitimate and the population pretty much fucking hated it. The government came into power by a coup, not a revolution.
How was it illegitimate? What is your evidence to say the population hated it?

The Saur Revolution wasn't a coup, it was a direct response from progressive forces to repression leveled against them. If it was a coup then the October Revolution is a coup also, and we know that that is a silly claim.

As the state of the Taliban for the last few decades has proven, only continued and sustained foreign intervention can prop up a puppet, and even then with difficulty.
I fail to see the relevance. The PDPA and the present Mayor of Kabul are hardly comparable in any meaningful sense.

I already went on in detail as to why a coup is not a substitute for a revolution, and why the government that results from such a coup cannot be the basis for permanent positive change. This discussion seems to be going in a circle, so I suppose I will leave you gentlemen alone to extol the virtues of adventurism and chauvinism.
It would be most edifying to see you explain why the Soviet intervention was either adventurist or chauvinist.

Like I wrote in another thread:
The leader of the PDPA was killing off his rivals and making overtures to the US, the Soviet intervention had to deal with that and make sure the party was something of a coherent progressive organization if the government was going to last. There wasn't much of a real choice in the matter.

Yehuda Stern

21st February 2012, 16:30

The leader of the PDPA was killing off his rivals and making overtures to the US, the Soviet intervention had to deal with that and make sure the party was something of a coherent progressive organization if the government was going to last. There wasn't much of a real choice in the matter.

As for killing off rivals, I don't think that's something that you couldn't just as easily say about the USSR occupation government, or the USSR and its satellite states themselves for that matter. As for overtures for the United States - can you expand on this? Haven't heard that claim before.

manic expression

21st February 2012, 17:02

As for killing off rivals, I don't think that's something that you couldn't just as easily say about the USSR occupation government, or the USSR and its satellite states themselves for that matter. As for overtures for the United States - can you expand on this? Haven't heard that claim before.
Amin was killed in the initial operation, but the USSR seemed to want cooperation between the Khalq and Parcham factions. In the context of 1979 Afghanistan, Amin was proving to be a very toxic figure, to say the least, and that could not be permitted in those conditions.

Amin had been trying to warm relations with Pakistan (http://books.google.no/books?id=zz9_Ve29eL0C&pg=PA160#v=onepage&q&f=false), which was a US client (I should have said he was making overtures to imperialist-aligned forces, so I was wrong on that specific wording).

daft punk

21st February 2012, 17:40

Bad decision both for the USSR and socialism, not that the leaders of the USSR had much interest in socialism, they sold out to capitalism a few years later. However once in they should have stuck it out. They left the place a worse shit-hole than ever. A civil war raged followed by terrible reactionary Taliban rule.

The Russians were not imperialist, and they didn't have much interest in Afghanistan at all, but they did have to prop up a client state in their eyes, and avoid it spilling over into Russia. Some say America provoked it.

The problem in Afghanistan was that the 'socialist' regime was half baked in the first place, they didn't even try to get their message over to the masses, they just blundered in. They only really took power as a defensive measure.

A good example of how not to attempt socialism.

And look at it now, one of the crappest places in the world.

Ocean Seal

21st February 2012, 18:25

Not imperialist, a bad decision, social-imperialist (which isn't really imperialist in the Leninist sense of the word). The struggle of two world powers, neither of which really had much to do with socialism.

A Marxist Historian

22nd February 2012, 00:28

No. The primary goal was to turn Afghanistan into a one huge poppy farm. The Taliban began burning poppy on moral grounds (and on the UN's request, to be admitted) a year prior to the US-led invasion. Now the heroin output is dozens of times higher than before the war. It's basically a Central Asian Columbia now.

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9558/poppyc.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/204/poppyc.jpg/)

.

That was the effect certainly, but not the purpose. US capitalists don't get much in the way of a cut off the heroin trade, and it really serves no particular US interests, the contrary in fact.

The US had to put somebody in to run the place, and if not the Muslim extremist fanatics, the Northern Alliance opium warlords were the only plausible alternatives.

I mean, the US was hardly about to try to resurrect Najibulah from his grave, now was it?

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

22nd February 2012, 00:33

Like I wrote in another thread:

Unfortunately, due to the way Revleft works, those who want to see what he wrote have to look elsewhere on the thread.

But really, Hafizullah Amin as the "left wing" of the PDPA? The guy was a tyrannical nutcase, whose brutality immensely facilitated the work of the Mujahedeen, and who just might really have been in cahoots with the CIA as charged, though we'll never know.

The Soviet methods of dealing with the bastard were questionable and Stalinist, better the guy should have been tried for his crimes rather than just blown away. Reminiscent of what Khrushchev did to Beria. But defending him is utterly insane.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

22nd February 2012, 00:43

Your entire argument seems to presuppose that because the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist, that it's actions were somehow more appropriate. This seems ridiculous frankly, in addition to this, the USSR WAS capitalist. It used the capitalist mode of production; it seems like the qualifier many here use is whether there was formal private property. You need to go back and read Marx again and note the emphasis on social relations of production. Trotsky had a very bone headed analysis of the Soviet Union, which I would attribute to his emotional attachment to it; and I would probably venture that this is what prevented him from making a rational analysis, it's also possible that he just was a poor Marxist; but from the quality of some of his previous things I would venture to say that it was the former rather than the latter.

So, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan because they are awesome people and truly had the concern of the Afghan people in mind. Who were the materialists here again?

This invasion was conducted by a capitalist country, and did not advance class struggle one iota. By virtue of the latter alone, it was worse than useless. What you essentially seem to be suggesting is that we can achieve positive permanent change without revolution as the basis, which is at best, reformist.

Was it a capitalist imperialist invasion? this is a dollars and cents question after all. Were the Soviets trying to steal natural resources, and exploit Afghan workers in sweatshops for the profit of Soviet bosses? Don't make me laugh.

Granted, the Americans had bigger fish to fry with respect to Afghanistan too, but the invasion of Afghanistan was a counterblow to 9/11, which challenged the whole US imperialist position in the world, vital to the US economy. I mean, without control over the oil of the Middle East, where would US capitalism be?

The idea that the USSR was capitalist is laughable, ask any capitalist. No stock market, no private property in the means of production, no unemployment, no reserve army of labor, free medical care and education, auto workers paid better than doctors and lawyers, in short totally different "social relations of production," and none of the features of capitalist society described by Marx in Das Kapital. You might try reading it you know.

Why did the USSR invade? Well, if you had bothered to actually read my posting, you'd have noticed that I compared the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Lincoln's invasion of and smashing of the Confederacy.

Which was not about freeing the slaves, it was simply about preserving the Union. But it had the effect of freeing the slaves, just as the Soviet intervention had the effect of freeing the women of Afghanistan, whereas the US invasion has had no such effects.

Why the difference? Because the USA is a capitalist imperialist power, and the USSR wasn't. Simple really.

-M.H.-

Grenzer

22nd February 2012, 01:26

Was it a capitalist imperialist invasion? this is a dollars and cents question after all. Were the Soviets trying to steal natural resources, and exploit Afghan workers in sweatshops for the profit of Soviet bosses? Don't make me laugh.

Granted, the Americans had bigger fish to fry with respect to Afghanistan too, but the invasion of Afghanistan was a counterblow to 9/11, which challenged the whole US imperialist position in the world, vital to the US economy. I mean, without control over the oil of the Middle East, where would US capitalism be?

The idea that the USSR was capitalist is laughable, ask any capitalist. No stock market, no private property in the means of production, no unemployment, no reserve army of labor, free medical care and education, auto workers paid better than doctors and lawyers, in short totally different "social relations of production," and none of the features of capitalist society described by Marx in Das Kapital. You might try reading it you know.

Why did the USSR invade? Well, if you had bothered to actually read my posting, you'd have noticed that I compared the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Lincoln's invasion of and smashing of the Confederacy.

Which was not about freeing the slaves, it was simply about preserving the Union. But it had the effect of freeing the slaves, just as the Soviet intervention had the effect of freeing the women of Afghanistan, whereas the US invasion has had no such effects.

Why the difference? Because the USA is a capitalist imperialist power, and the USSR wasn't. Simple really.

-M.H.-

Are you seriously suggesting that we should define socialism and capitalism by what the bourgeoisie say? I guess the Soviet Union is not capitalist because Ronald Reagan said so, and that communism is evil and terrible then.

Both the USSR and the United States were imperialist capitalist powers. You don't need to be an expert in Marxist analysis to realize that, but I suppose you let Trotsky do all your thinking for you, don't you? This is not the thread to discuss the nature of the USSR, so I will speak no more about it here. It's in cases like this that Trotskyism rears its ugly head for what it really is: simply another face of Stalinism.

It's really irrelevant what their incentive was in invading Afghanistan. You seem to be suggesting that any arbitrary show of force and coercion is acceptable so long as it's not motivated by money, even if it's less than useless in the long run. The fact remains that it did nothing to advance the cause of class struggle and revolution, and no positive change can be lasting without these things. Your line of thinking would not be out of place with the likes of Pol Pot and Idi Amin.

If killing as many Islamists as could be found actually provided a basis for permanent gains in women's rights, then it might be another matter. It's forgivable that Trotskyist parties and the like might have supported the invasion back then, but with experience and hind sight; it's inexcusable. The Soviet Union tried it, and now the US is trying it again. It. Does. Not. Work.

Also, you're a terrible historian if you think you can make an analogy with the Civil War. Ever heard of anachronism?

If you can only make lame straw men and regurgitate the party line, then I don't see what the point of continued debate is. At least Manic Expression is interested in genuine engagement.

If you ever give bored of spitting out for what passes as Spart polemics these days, then you might think of becoming a writer for American Thinker.

Bostana

22nd February 2012, 01:39

Leonid Brezhnev, the president of the USSR at the time, was an open Russian nationalist and led the USSR into this Imperialistic war in Afghanistan and other Imperialistic meddling in trying to assert influence in no-socialist countries.

GoddessCleoLover

22nd February 2012, 02:07

Apparently Kosygin led the faction that was wary of intervention while Andropov led the pro-invasion faction, and an aging and increasingly decrepit Brezhnev ultimately went along with the Andropov faction.

Zulu

22nd February 2012, 04:01

That was the effect certainly, but not the purpose. US capitalists don't get much in the way of a cut off the heroin trade, and it really serves no particular US interests, the contrary in fact.

How does heroin trade work against the US interests? I think you really should do some research on how the drug trade works.

But I digress, the drug trade was only part of the the interests involved in the US-led occupation. The other big part was the military industrial complex lobbying, and it's always better for the MIC to have a war going than not... This was a factor in the Soviet occupation as well.

The US had to put somebody in to run the place, and if not the Muslim extremist fanatics, the Northern Alliance opium warlords were the only plausible alternatives

And religious fanatics are used as easy-to-manipulate proxies and scapegoats in the imperialist schemes. Ever heard of the LIHOP-MIHOP therories RE: 9/11?

In any case, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are two very different things. They both originated during the Soviet occupation and have been therefore intermingled to an extent, especially since all their sponsors were together in biting the USSR piece by piece at the time. But the fact remains that Al Qaeda was mainly the love child of the CIA, while the Taliban was raised primarily with the Pakistani and Chinese support (there was even a rumor that the Taliban's idea to blow up the statues of Buddha was a nasty prank of somebody in the Chinese intelligence services who wanted to remember the days of his Culture Revolution youth). So you see, these entities are rather bound to be at odds with each other these days.

pastradamus

22nd February 2012, 04:41

They knew the US had their eyes on the jem of east asia and decided to get there first. Seriously, it was an act of the Soviet Union believing they had a "sphere" like the US thinks it does. Bad decisiom that ended badly.

A Marxist Historian

22nd February 2012, 09:55

Are you seriously suggesting that we should define socialism and capitalism by what the bourgeoisie say? I guess the Soviet Union is not capitalist because Ronald Reagan said so, and that communism is evil and terrible then.

Both the USSR and the United States were imperialist capitalist powers. You don't need to be an expert in Marxist analysis to realize that, but I suppose you let Trotsky do all your thinking for you, don't you? This is not the thread to discuss the nature of the USSR, so I will speak no more about it here. It's in cases like this that Trotskyism rears its ugly head for what it really is: simply another face of Stalinism.

It's really irrelevant what their incentive was in invading Afghanistan. You seem to be suggesting that any arbitrary show of force and coercion is acceptable so long as it's not motivated by money, even if it's less than useless in the long run. The fact remains that it did nothing to advance the cause of class struggle and revolution, and no positive change can be lasting without these things. Your line of thinking would not be out of place with the likes of Pol Pot and Idi Amin.

If killing as many Islamists as could be found actually provided a basis for permanent gains in women's rights, then it might be another matter. It's forgivable that Trotskyist parties and the like might have supported the invasion back then, but with experience and hind sight; it's inexcusable. The Soviet Union tried it, and now the US is trying it again. It. Does. Not. Work.

Also, you're a terrible historian if you think you can make an analogy with the Civil War. Ever heard of anachronism?

If you can only make lame straw men and regurgitate the party line, then I don't see what the point of continued debate is. At least Manic Expression is interested in genuine engagement.

If you ever give bored of spitting out for what passes as Spart polemics these days, then you might think of becoming a writer for American Thinker.

You don't need to be an expert in Marxism to know that the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist. You just need to have half a brain.

Nobody on earth except for sectarian cranks like yourself thinks that. It's just a form of flat earthism. Absurd on the face of it. You can't have a capitalist system with no capitalists, no corporations, no stock market, in fact no private ownership of the means of production. China is arguable, the USSR simply isn't.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR held off hideous bloodstained counterrevolution for a decade. When the Najibullah regime collapsed, darkness fell on Afghanistan, the whole country collapsed into chaos and bloodshed, Kabul was shot to pieces, the warlords destroying everything the Afghan people were able to build under Soviet protection.

Last week the New York Times ran a bunch of articles with interviews with ordinary people on the streets of Kabul. Now that the US is planning to get the hell out, finally the NYT is allowed to tell the truth -- which is that people in Kabul feel tremendous nostalgia for the Soviet-backed regime in the '80s, when life was so much better for the urban population andwhat little working class Afghanistan has than it is now.

Yes, the war against the crazed Muslim reactionaries was pretty bloody. Class struggle is like that some times. In the words of General Sherman, "war is hell."

And as for the "terrible historian" bit ... How 'bout Isaac Deutscher, with all his analogies between Stalin and Napoleon? A lot of folk think he was one of the great historians. Oh yeah, he's a Trotskyist too, therefore just terrible.

Analogy is a vital method of historical understanding.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

22nd February 2012, 10:06

How does heroin trade work against the US interests? I think you really should do some research on how the drug trade works.

But I digress, the drug trade was only part of the the interests involved in the US-led occupation. The other big part was the military industrial complex lobbying, and it's always better for the MIC to have a war going than not... This was a factor in the Soviet occupation as well.

During the Cold War, the drug trade was very useful indeed, for political not economic reasons. Starting with US collaboration with the Mafia in Sicily vs. the Italian Communists, continuing through the Vietnam War with alliances with heroin lords vs. the Vietcong, then the contras in Nicaragua, and then of course the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the '80s.

All as part of the Cold War vs. the Soviet Union, allying with all sorts of reactionary elements in the Third World, of which the drug warlords and Islamic fanatics of Afghanistan were the most chemically pure examples.

But now, with the Cold War over, it's all blowback of no use whatsoever to the US. just something biting America in the butt, very much like
Al Quaida and the Taliban.

And religious fanatics are used as easy-to-manipulate proxies and scapegoats in the imperialist schemes. Ever heard of the LIHOP-MIHOP therories RE: 9/11?

Oy! Not 9/11 conspiracy nonsense! Please!

In any case, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are two very different things. They both originated during the Soviet occupation and have been therefore intermingled to an extent, especially since all their sponsors were together in biting the USSR piece by piece at the time. But the fact remains that Al Qaeda was mainly the love child of the CIA, while the Taliban was raised primarily with the Pakistani and Chinese support (there was even a rumor that the Taliban's idea to blow up the statues of Buddha was a nasty prank of somebody in the Chinese intelligence services who wanted to remember the days of his Culture Revolution youth). So you see, these entities are rather bound to be at odds with each other these days.

The Taliban had very little Chinese input, don't know where you're getting that from. Everybody knows that the Taliban was a Pakistani project.

But it was a Pakistani project that had full 100% US approval, cooked up by Uncle Sam's very favorite Pakistani leader, the late Benazir Bhutto. So that's really a distinction without much of a difference.

-M.H.-

Zulu

22nd February 2012, 13:28

During the Cold War, the drug trade was very useful indeed, for political not economic reasons. Starting with US collaboration with the Mafia in Sicily vs. the Italian Communists, continuing through the Vietnam War with alliances with heroin lords vs. the Vietcong, then the contras in Nicaragua, and then of course the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the '80s.

All as part of the Cold War vs. the Soviet Union, allying with all sorts of reactionary elements in the Third World, of which the drug warlords and Islamic fanatics of Afghanistan were the most chemically pure examples.

But now, with the Cold War over, it's all blowback of no use whatsoever to the US. just something biting America in the butt, very much like
Al Quaida and the Taliban.

Doing business with "Our Snake" type of guys was usually first about doing business, because it's profitable, and it's capitalism and capitalists. When it was helping fight the "Empire of Evil", well, that was a nice bonus. Then again, the "evilness" and "godlessness" of communism was ideology, propaganda, in other words, the superstructure. And the basis was: the communists wanted to interfere and shut down with all kinds of business, including the drug trade. But it's not like without communists the drug trade isn't a profitable business anymore, so why would the capitalists stop doing it? What "blowback" do they have to deal with? Poor schoolkids and prostitutes destroying their lives with lethal addiction? As if they ever cared. If anything, there is always the Fox News to blame the drug trade on Chavez and the same Taliban that tried to do something about it.

Oy! Not 9/11 conspiracy nonsense! Please!

Why not? They say, a lot of money were made on it, even without all the side effects and ripples it created...

The Taliban had very little Chinese input, don't know where you're getting that from. Everybody knows that the Taliban was a Pakistani project.

But it was a Pakistani project that had full 100% US approval, cooked up by Uncle Sam's very favorite Pakistani leader, the late Benazir Bhutto. So that's really a distinction without much of a difference.

-M.H.-
Pakistan was always very much more aligned with China, than with the US. Because of India. So long as India was aligned with the USSR, and China was aligned with the US, Pakistan was naturally involved with the US. So the Taliban was of course apporved by the US during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But the Taliban also operated in the contested areas of India, which was in the interests of both China and Pakistan. So, after the USSR went down, and India drifted into the US "orbit", while China was becoming more of a potential rival, the US-Pakistani relations cooled down, making Taliban more of a problem for the US and the transnationals. Finally, the decision by the Taliban to put an end to the heroin production (which was probably influenced not in small part by China too, seeing how China had its own rich history with drug trade) was what put it at odds with the imperialists.

.

Yehuda Stern

22nd February 2012, 17:26

ME: Would you be a bit more specific? Giving me a link to a book really doesn't do the work - it'll obviously take me a while to read the whole thing. At any rate, considering how many times the USSR has warmed or tried to warm relations with imperialist or imperialist-aligned countries (including Israel), I hardly think one can count on this as one of the motives.

A Marxist Historian: No one is saying Amin was a socialist revolutionary (you and ME were the ones claiming here that Stalinists can play such a role - at least he doesn't falsely claim to be a Trotskyist). But there's nothing to suggest that he was "in cahoots with the CIA" (at least I've never seen any evidence). Brutal as he may have been, I find it hard to believe that he facilitated the work of the mujahedin as much as the USSR occupation government:

But the facts speak to the fact that the Stalinists invaded to stop the revolution. In time honored Stalinist fashion, the Soviet Army moved in to bring the revolution to a halt. The first thing the Stalinists did was overthrow the revolutionary government and kill off the forces that really wanted to fight the mullahs. They installed their own man, Babrak Karmal, with instructions to try and cut a deal with the Islamic reactionaries. Karmal immediately called on the mullahs to support his government, promising “respect for our family, peoples, and national traditions.” [“Afghanistan and Pseudo-Trotskyism,” Socialist Voice No. 9.] Code words for the barbarous oppression of women and ethnic minorities in Afghanistan, that the revolution had at one time fought. Following Moscow’s orders, Karmal added to his cabinet three men from the pre-revolutionary monarchist government. To symbolize this he brought down the red flag of the Afghan revolution, added green to it, and a picture of the Koran, and brought it back up the flag pole. You can see a picture of Karmal in one of our publications addressing the first conference of Mullahs in Afghanistan (http://lrp-cofi.org/pamphlets/debate2003_i.html). [LRP vs. SL pamphlet.]

EDIT: Yeah, you're reading right. The first conference of the mullahs in Afghanistan took place under the socialist revolutionary government of the USSR imperialist occupation. A fine way to defend the revolution, indeed.

Psy

22nd February 2012, 22:58

If the USSR proletarianized the Afghans it would have worked. For example the USSR got the RZhD (USSR's railway) to employ everyone in Afghanistan in building railways throughout Afghanistan, then Afghanistan would have been on a fast track to modernity and they would be Afghans no more (in the sense of what Afghanistan was) they would all would become navvies instead (Navigation Engineers) and before you know it they'd be unionized and class consciouses.

Of course that is if the USSR wanted to turn Afghanistan into a workers state.

Yehuda Stern

23rd February 2012, 15:26

Psy

23rd February 2012, 22:42

So your idea of "proletarianizing" a country is to invade it, crush its independent government, force all its citizens to work in some job benefiting the occupier, and erase its national identity? Hey Palestinians! Don't you see? Israel has just been "proletarianizing" you all this time!

What would the USSR get from building railways into Afghanistan other then cheap rock that the USSR already had tons of? The point is to just toss the Afghanistan means of production in the trash bin and just industrialize it from scratch and transforming the masses of Afghanistan into a army of industrialization.

As for national identity what proletariat has identity with feudal mode of production? Why would Afghanistan industrial care about their feudal past when they have food and drink in the bellies and a warm bed plus wages making them far richer then the Afghanistan aristocracy?

(Never mind the fact, of course, the USSR's working class was one of the least organized and class conscious in the world, and that its economy broke down a decade later exactly because of silly schemes like the ones you mention here.)
The USSR never tried to buy off its working class with commodities, the USSR never flooded the stores with consumer goods so USSR workers sing the praises of GOSPLAN.

GoddessCleoLover

23rd February 2012, 22:50

Perhaps there are reasons that never happened. Don't you believe that Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev would have pursued such a policy had it been feasible?

Psy

23rd February 2012, 23:18

Perhaps there are reasons that never happened. Don't you believe that Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev would have pursued such a policy had it been feasible?
Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev could not get past production for surplus value, their view of the goal of the USSR economy was the USSR produced exports to get imports of greater value. None saw production as a means to expand the revolution, for example using their production to ensure France became a worker state by being there with industrial aid in May 1968.

GoddessCleoLover

23rd February 2012, 23:22

Don't forget that Soviet production was largely geared toward assuring the Union's position as a great military superpower.

Psy

23rd February 2012, 23:35

Don't forget that Soviet production was largely geared toward assuring the Union's position as a great military superpower.
Right but from a revolutionary perspective, gearing production to spread the revolution is a far better defense. Instead of having a massive army to counter NATO's, you undermined NATO's ability to keep their workers in line so more NATO divisions are required to crush worker uprisings in NATO countries.

GoddessCleoLover

23rd February 2012, 23:46

Psy

24th February 2012, 00:24

Afghanistan is a classic example of where the Soviets attempted to substitute brute force for the types of alternatives for which you advocate. Suffice to say that there must have been reason innate to the Soviet regime that caused them to adopt such counter-productive policies. But that opens up a very long and contentious arena for debate.
Right that is my point, if the USSR came in there and industrialized the place in a few years then the Mujahideen would have find the ground underneath give way as modernity came to Afghanistan causing the culture to change over night. Rural Afghan farmers would be part of large construction projects and introduced to commodity fetishism, where some of their vices can be satisfied with their wages. Thus the Majahideen would talking to a population the would grow more and more hungry for commodities.

GoddessCleoLover

24th February 2012, 00:28

Psy

24th February 2012, 01:24

Except that they were either unwilling or unable to promote such an industrial revolution in Soviet central Asia, so I doubt that they would have been able to execute such a policy in Afghanistan.

The USSR was able to industrialize remote regions.

Suffice to say that the Afghan people would have resisted any attempt to Sovietize their country, even if the Russians had offered assistance with respect to industrialization.
Stop and think about it. The USSR comes in and offers the Afghan people commodities in exchange for labor, Afghan youth would flock to sign up for USSR construction crews as long as the USSR keeps giving them enough wages to satisfy their vices. Do you honestly think young Afghan males when faced with female construction workers that they can drink with after their shift would be receptive to Mujahideen's cries about the USSR bringing depravity to Afghanistan? Why wouldn't the Afghan youth after tasting such commodities demand more?

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 08:13

Doing business with "Our Snake" type of guys was usually first about doing business, because it's profitable, and it's capitalism and capitalists. When it was helping fight the "Empire of Evil", well, that was a nice bonus. Then again, the "evilness" and "godlessness" of communism was ideology, propaganda, in other words, the superstructure. And the basis was: the communists wanted to interfere and shut down with all kinds of business, including the drug trade. But it's not like without communists the drug trade isn't a profitable business anymore, so why would the capitalists stop doing it? What "blowback" do they have to deal with? Poor schoolkids and prostitutes destroying their lives with lethal addiction? As if they ever cared. If anything, there is always the Fox News to blame the drug trade on Chavez and the same Taliban that tried to do something about it.

A pleasant fantasy for leftists, that makes capitalists sound Real Bad, but that has the disadvantage of not being true.

Is the drug trade a business? Yes. Are the smalltime capitalists involved in the drug trade the same as the bigtime capitalists who run America? No. From the standpoint of the Morgans, the Rockefellers, Chase Manhattan, the Koch brothers etc., these guys are smalltimers who give capitalism a bad name.

But they were very useful vs. the Soviets, something they put a lot of effort into keeping out of the newspapers.

You really think that the big capitalists feel some sort of solidarity with drug pushers as fellow capitalists? You are seriously deluded if that's what you think.

Why not? They say, a lot of money were made on it, even without all the side effects and ripples it created...

Pakistan was always very much more aligned with China, than with the US. Because of India. So long as India was aligned with the USSR, and China was aligned with the US, Pakistan was naturally involved with the US. So the Taliban was of course apporved by the US during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But the Taliban also operated in the contested areas of India, which was in the interests of both China and Pakistan. So, after the USSR went down, and India drifted into the US "orbit", while China was becoming more of a potential rival, the US-Pakistani relations cooled down, making Taliban more of a problem for the US and the transnationals. Finally, the decision by the Taliban to put an end to the heroin production (which was probably influenced not in small part by China too, seeing how China had its own rich history with drug trade) was what put it at odds with the imperialists.

No, Pakistan was never aligned with China except on a convenience basis. First set up by the Brits, it rapidly became an American neo-colony, vying with India for American affections after the Soviet Union collapsed and the India-Soviet alliance ended.

Before the USSR collapsed, Pakistan and the US under Nixon, Reagan etc. were "like lips and teeth," to use the Maoist expression.

Why were the Taliban against the drug trade in the past? Because, well, it's against Islam, and the Taliban are nothing if not Islamic fanatics. China had absolutely nothing to do with it.

But practical ones. Now they are up to their neck in the heroin trade, it's a major source of Taliban revenue, every bit as much as for Karzai and his warlords.

Where do you get all this nonsense? From the 9-11 conspiracy nutcases, I suppose?

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 08:36

ME: Would you be a bit more specific? Giving me a link to a book really doesn't do the work - it'll obviously take me a while to read the whole thing. At any rate, considering how many times the USSR has warmed or tried to warm relations with imperialist or imperialist-aligned countries (including Israel), I hardly think one can count on this as one of the motives.

A Marxist Historian: No one is saying Amin was a socialist revolutionary (you and ME were the ones claiming here that Stalinists can play such a role - at least he doesn't falsely claim to be a Trotskyist). But there's nothing to suggest that he was "in cahoots with the CIA" (at least I've never seen any evidence). Brutal as he may have been, I find it hard to believe that he facilitated the work of the mujahedin as much as the USSR occupation government:

EDIT: Yeah, you're reading right. The first conference of the mullahs in Afghanistan took place under the socialist revolutionary government of the USSR imperialist occupation. A fine way to defend the revolution, indeed.

That Amin was in cahoots with the CIA or maybe Pakistan may well have been a Stalinist slander--or it might have been perfectly true, such things happen. The PDPA was, after all, primarily based in the Soviet-trained officer corps of the royal Afghan army and the Kabul intelligentsia and studentry, and not in the proletariat, so there would be nothing particularly surprising about that.

BTW, just how does the LRP's enthusiasm for the PDPA, victimized by the evil Soviet Stalinists, square with its general analysis of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, according to which the USSR was capitalist? I'd think to be consistent you'd have to dismiss the quite thoroughly Stalinist and hardly proletarian PDPA as bourgeois reactionaries.

But then the LRP has always been famous for its inconsistencies. An old friend of mine who knew LRP founder Sy Landy from YPSL days, and rather liked him actually, likes to joke that he should have been forced to go around shaking a bell to warn of his presence, rather like medieval lepers, except that whereas the lepers had to shout "unclean," he should have to shout "unclear."

As for Amin, yeah, he was definitely bad news. Had the Soviet Union not sent its troops in, the mullahs would have triumphed then and there, their work was not just "facilitated" by Amin, it was damn near completed, his regime was crumbling. So your condemnation of the Soviets for letting the mullahs have a public conference is pretty weird. Better than than a victory conference, I should think.

Karmal was better, and Najibullah, a fairly capable leader, a vast improvement. And, given Afghan circumstances, I hesitate to condemn too heavily all the concessions the regime tried to make to the quite popular reactionary opposition movement to all its reforms. Certainly letting the mullahs have a conference was a better idea than fighting a civil war with them--except that, obviously, it didn't work.

Basically, the best solution in Afghanistan would have been annexation, so that Afghanistan could become another Central Asian 'stan like Tadzhikistan. Certainly a vastly better situation than Afghanistan now!

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 08:47

Except that they were either unwilling or unable to promote such an industrial revolution in Soviet central Asia, so I doubt that they would have been able to execute such a policy in Afghanistan. Suffice to say that the Afghan people would have resisted any attempt to Sovietize their country, even if the Russians had offered assistance with respect to industrialization.

Absolutely incorrect. The social progress in Soviet Central Asia, compared to before the Revolution, was absolutely astonishing. Including quite a bit of industrialization in fact, of a population of nomads on horse and camelback before the Revolution. Plus a lot of cotton growing, mining, nuclear missile bases etc.

Nowadays Kazakhstan and the other 'stans, though the regimes there are quite unpleasant, are really not that far behind Russia or Ukraine from the standpoint of social development. Certainly far, far ahead of Afghanistan, which was not at all the case before the Revolution.

In Kabul, the capital, and most other urban centers, not only were the Afghan people accepting and supportive of the Soviet-backed social reforms, but you know what, they still are, you should read those recent New York Times stories by reporters now finally allowed to tell the truth, since the Times figures the US is getting out anyway.

In the back hills is another matter, just as it was at first in Soviet Central Asia too, where you had a reactionary guerilla movement in the '20s called the "basmachi," who were a lot like the Mujahedeen and also at first had a lot of popular support.

But when the Soviets went into Afghanistan, they made a point of sending in troops as much as possible from Central Asia, as the Central Asians knew and understood the great benefits they had received from Sovietization, and had clear memories of the basmachi, and not favorable ones.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 08:54

Perhaps there are reasons that never happened. Don't you believe that Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev would have pursued such a policy had it been feasible?

Psy was being ironical, you missed the point.

You see, that's exactly what Brezhnev did do--till the rubles ran out, with the Soviet economy falling behind the West due to too much resources used for consumer goods for the workers and (unavoidably) stuff for the military, and not enough for modernizing and computerizing Soviet industry.

Imitated on an even larger scale by the Polish bureaucrats, with the line you may have heard about how in the '70s they tried to shut up working class complaints by "stuffing the workers mouths with sausage." Until the sausage, paid for by loans from Western bankers, ran out, and the bankers started to demand repayment...

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 09:05

Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev could not get past production for surplus value, their view of the goal of the USSR economy was the USSR produced exports to get imports of greater value. None saw production as a means to expand the revolution, for example using their production to ensure France became a worker state by being there with industrial aid in May 1968.

Hm? I guess I misread you completely.

The Soviet focus was producing export goods to make a profit? Hardly. True, they exported a lot of oil, but that wasn't to fill up Swiss bank accounts for Soviet bureaucrats, but to fuel the economy.

I notice you left Stalin off your list of "surplus value producers," and I suppose this is not accidental.

You do know that it was under Stalin, not any of his successors, that you had the experiment in Iran of setting up a Soviet oil company in imitation of American companies to exploit Iranian oil, during the year or two the Soviets were occupying Northern Iran? Something the Iranians have not exactly forgotten.

And that the USSR actually requested at the UN that it be the country to administer Italy's former colony of Libya?

It is really rather fortunate for the Soviet workers state that the imperialists told Molotov to get lost about Libya, and that they demanded, and got, Soviet withdrawal from Northern Iran as early as 1946.

As for France in 1968, the French semi-revolution was halted by the French CP, with the enthusiastic support of Brezhnev. Just as it was the French CP, with not merely encouragement from Stalin but direct orders, who joined a coalition government with De Gaulle and helped De Gaulle disarm the Resistance fighters and reconsolidate a French bourgeois state, after WWII.

Or in 1936 for that matter, with the French CP putting an end to the great labor revolt of the Popular Front years, with Thorez's famous line, "it is necessary to know when to end a strike."

-M.H.-

robbo203

24th February 2012, 09:11

You don't need to be an expert in Marxism to know that the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist. You just need to have half a brain.

Nobody on earth except for sectarian cranks like yourself thinks that. It's just a form of flat earthism. Absurd on the face of it. You can't have a capitalist system with no capitalists, no corporations, no stock market, in fact no private ownership of the means of production. China is arguable, the USSR simply isn't
-M.H.-

Here we go again - the same old anti-marxist crap dredged up by the ever tedious MH.

What does Marxism have to say about capitalism and its defining features? One thing is for sure - it is defined by the fact that generalised wage labour prevails. This lies at the very heart of the Marxian definition of capitalism. Wage labour presuppose capital. Capital presupposes wage labour. They respectively condition each other. Look up the pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital by Herr Marx, MH , if you have ever bothered to do so before

The Soviet Union was emphatically based on a system of generalised wage labour, on commodity production , on profit (state enterprises were required by law to keep profit and loss accounts and were penalised for not making profits). Means of production (along with consumer goods and labour power) were bought and sold between state enterprises and were subject to legally binding contracts. There was a heavily regulated market but a heavily regulated market is still a market economy. Need I go on?

Of course there were differences between soviet style capitalism and western capitalism just as there are differences between Scandinavian capitalism and American capitalism. So what? These were superficial. The Soviet capitalist class related to the means of production not via private equity holdings but through their stranglehold on the state machine which was the supreme locus of decisionmaking as far as the allocation of the economic surplus was concerned. There was a world of difference between the position of a party apparatchik and an ordinary Russian worker vis-a-vis the means of production and the massive and carefully documented income inequalities reflected this undeniable institituional fact.

The Soviet capitalist class collectively monopolised the means of production as a class in de facto terms rather than as individual capitalists. Individual capitalist qua individual capitalists are not essential to capitalism. You prattle on about how you can't have a "capitalist system with no capitalists, no corporations, no stock market, in fact no private ownership of the means of production".These are historically contingent, secondary features that define particular variants of capitalism - not capitalism per se. How else would you explain the views of another Marxist, Fred Engels:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

According to you Engels must have been a "sectarian crank" for suggesting you can have capitalism without individual capitalists gambling on a stock exchange. But with your head stuck ostrich-like in the sand there are probably a lot of other things about Marxism that youve completely missed as well in your superficial and trite commentary on the subject

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 09:59

Here we go again - the same old anti-marxist crap dredged up by the ever tedious MH.

What does Marxism have to say about capitalism and its defining features? One thing is for sure - it is defined by the fact that generalised wage labour prevails. This lies at the very heart of the Marxian definition of capitalism. Wage labour presuppose capital. Capital presupposes wage labour. They respectively condition each other. Look up the pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital by Herr Marx, MH , if you have ever bothered to do so before

The Soviet Union was emphatically based on a system of generalised wage labour, on commodity production , on profit (state enterprises were required by law to keep profit and loss accounts and were penalised for not making profits). Means of production (along with consumer goods and labour power) were bought and sold between state enterprises and were subject to legally binding contracts. There was a heavily regulated market but a heavily regulated market is still a market economy. Need I go on?

Yo don't need to, in fact you shouldn't, a waste of perfectly good electrons for foolery.

Did the USSR use profit and loss for bookkeeping purposes at the factory level? Sure. This practice, called "khozraschet," introduced not under Stalin but under Lenin, if that makes any difference to you, had absolutely nothing to do with the role of profit in a capitalist economy.

In a capitalist economy, a factory that loses money will sooner or later go bankrupt and close down. In the USSR, the manager would be censured, maybe even fired, and government subsidies would have to increase. This was simply and merely an efficiency measure, and a sensible and intelligent one at that.

Did factories sell stuff to each other? Of course they did. Unless money were abolished, what else could they do? And until a complete socialist economy could be constructed, an utter impossibility in a single country, especially one as socially backward as Russia, abolition of money was impossible, and if tried would have been disastrous.

As for those "legally binding contracts," they again were just a matter of convenience, which the regime could and did rip up at a moment's notice whenever convenient. Smething frankly they probably did too much of.

Basically you are arguing that money should be abolished, as unless money is abolished, then you automatically have wage labor. Does Marx say in the pamphlet you mention that money needed to be abolished, the day after the revolution? Of course not.

Well, just what did Marx say should be done the day after the Revolution? This is not a subject he was silent about. He wrote something called the Communist Manifesto. Ever read it? This is what he says there:

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."

In other words, exactly what the Bolsheviks did in Russia, and something very different from what you seem to think Marxists would do. Indeed, he seems to advocate "production for the sake of production," which I have a deep suspicion is one of your bugaboos.

Is there a single word in the whole pamphlet about abolishing money, or wage labor, the day after the Revolution? Not one.

As for your hallucinatory maundering below about how the difference between the USSR and America is no bigger than the difference between Sweden and America, it hardly even deserves an answer, it's so ridiculous.

We have the occasional Swedes here, I am sure they could set you straight on that.

But let's at least defend Engels against your gross misinterpretations of him, since he is dead and can't defend himself.

Of course there were differences between soviet style capitalism and western capitalism just as there are differences between Scandinavian capitalism and American capitalism. So what? These were superficial....

How else would you explain the views of another Marxist, Fred Engels:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

According to you Engels must have been a "sectarian crank" for suggesting you can have capitalism without individual capitalists gambling on a stock exchange. But with your head stuck ostrich-like in the sand there are probably a lot of other things about Marxism that youve completely missed as well in your superficial and trite commentary on the subject

Here we have the difference between algebra and calculus. "State capitalism" as a system is something approached as a limit of the differential equation, the more and more capitalist enterprises go into state ownership, for the benefit of the capitalist class as a whole. (Usually, in fact, because they are losing money, so private capitalists don't want them.) It can't actually get there, or the entire system collapses, as Engels explains elsewhere. Any more than any other differential can actually reach the limit. So Engels is saying nothing of the sort.

What he is saying is that nationalizations under a capitalist regime, like say the post office in the USA or all sorts of things in Western Europe until recently or whole swatches of industry in the Third World at various points, has nothing socialist about it.

The question is the nature of the state itself. If a capitalist state, nationalizations are for the benefit of the capitalist class. If a workers state, for the benefit of the workers.

How do you tell the difference? By looking at the society. If you have a capitalist class who own the means of production, then it is a capitalist state. If not, as in the USSR, then not.

It's ownership that matters, not who runs things. As Marx explains in Das Kapital, management, the folk who run things, are employees of the capitalists, not capitalists themselves. Something Friedrich Engels, of course, was personally familiar with.

So the Soviet bureaucrats couldn't be a capitalist class, precisely because they were bureaucrats. Bureaucrats always work for somebody other than themselves, that is their nature and virtually their definition.

-M.H.-

Psy

24th February 2012, 10:41

Hm? I guess I misread you completely.

The Soviet focus was producing export goods to make a profit? Hardly. True, they exported a lot of oil, but that wasn't to fill up Swiss bank accounts for Soviet bureaucrats, but to fuel the economy.

And that is the logic of production for surplus value, that you need capital to fuel a economy even one a large as the Comecon.

The idea of production for the sake of utility was crushed in the 1960's when GOSPLAN shot down the idea of planning production through cybernetics.

Dabrowski

24th February 2012, 12:27

Not imperialist and a great thing! Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!

The reason that Afghanistan is such a reactionary hellhole today is that Gorbachev pulled out the Soviet troops.

Yehuda Stern

24th February 2012, 20:36

What would the USSR get from building railways into Afghanistan other then cheap rock that the USSR already had tons of? The point is to just toss the Afghanistan means of production in the trash bin and just industrialize it from scratch and transforming the masses of Afghanistan into a army of industrialization.

As for national identity what proletariat has identity with feudal mode of production? Why would Afghanistan industrial care about their feudal past when they have food and drink in the bellies and a warm bed plus wages making them far richer then the Afghanistan aristocracy?

In a nutshell: what stands behind all your talk about "proletarianizing" is European paternalist racism and a view that workers (especially ones in Muslim countries!) are dumb beasts that can be won over and persuaded to give up on their identities in return for supplying their basic needs. It's not that I'm surprised; it's just that it's always nice to have evidence.

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 20:42

And that is the logic of production for surplus value, that you need capital to fuel a economy even one a large as the Comecon.

The idea of production for the sake of utility was crushed in the 1960's when GOSPLAN shot down the idea of planning production through cybernetics.

Yes, that was one of GOSPLAN's biggest mistakes. Because the GOSPLAN bureaucrats were afraid that if you computerized everything, they'd lose control.

But yes, even as large as COMECON was, it was definitely behind the imperialists in terms of labor productivity and technology, so imports from the West were necessary. Not only can't you build socialism in one country, you can't build it in a bunch of countries either, especially if those countries are socially and technologically more backward than the imperialist centers.

And COMECON itself was a horrible example of what is wrong with the "socialism in one country" approach. Fearing Soviet domination, the Eastern Europeans insisted on a level of economic integration actually much less than that of the EEC or the EU!

So each country had its own separate steel or auto or whatever production, totally separate from all the others. So even at best, i.e. in East Germany, you had the "department store economy" approach, with East Germany trying to manufacture absolutely everything itself in half a country, inevitably leading to relative economic decline vis a vis western competition, a particularly burning question for East Germany of course.

-M.H.-

Yehuda Stern

24th February 2012, 20:45

That Amin was in cahoots with the CIA or maybe Pakistan may well have been a Stalinist slander--or it might have been perfectly true, such things happen. The PDPA was, after all, primarily based in the Soviet-trained officer corps of the royal Afghan army and the Kabul intelligentsia and studentry, and not in the proletariat, so there would be nothing particularly surprising about that.

I claim that you are in cahoots with the CIA. This may be slander, or it may be true. You are, after all, an American pretending to be a Trotskyist, so there should be nothing particularly surprising about that.

BTW, just how does the LRP's enthusiasm for the PDPA, victimized by the evil Soviet Stalinists, square with its general analysis of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, according to which the USSR was capitalist? I'd think to be consistent you'd have to dismiss the quite thoroughly Stalinist and hardly proletarian PDPA as bourgeois reactionaries.

The LRP has no enthusiasm for the PDPA that I know of.

But then the LRP has always been famous for its inconsistencies. An old friend of mine who knew LRP founder Sy Landy from YPSL days, and rather liked him actually, likes to joke that he should have been forced to go around shaking a bell to warn of his presence, rather like medieval lepers, except that whereas the lepers had to shout "unclean," he should have to shout "unclear."

Well, you wouldn't be a Spartacist if you wouldn't have to resort to slander to defend your reactionary politics, would you.

As for Amin, yeah, he was definitely bad news. Had the Soviet Union not sent its troops in, the mullahs would have triumphed then and there, their work was not just "facilitated" by Amin, it was damn near completed, his regime was crumbling. So your condemnation of the Soviets for letting the mullahs have a public conference is pretty weird. Better than than a victory conference, I should think.

Karmal was better, and Najibullah, a fairly capable leader, a vast improvement. And, given Afghan circumstances, I hesitate to condemn too heavily all the concessions the regime tried to make to the quite popular reactionary opposition movement to all its reforms. Certainly letting the mullahs have a conference was a better idea than fighting a civil war with them--except that, obviously, it didn't work.

Basically, the best solution in Afghanistan would have been annexation, so that Afghanistan could become another Central Asian 'stan like Tadzhikistan. Certainly a vastly better situation than Afghanistan now!

More nonsense and European racist paternalism. Spare me.

A Marxist Historian

24th February 2012, 20:45

In a nutshell: what stands behind all your talk about "proletarianizing" is European paternalist racism and a view that workers (especially ones in Muslim countries!) are dumb beasts that can be won over and persuaded to give up on their identities in return for supplying their basic needs. It's not that I'm surprised; it's just that it's always nice to have evidence.

So if Afghan workers don't like feudalism and reaction and want to live in modern societies and eat regularly, they are "dumb beasts," which is your language not his?

Who is being the paternalist racist here? Not Psy, at least not by the evidence of this posting of his you went off on.

-M.H.-

Yehuda Stern

24th February 2012, 20:48

The paternalist racists are those who claim that Muslims need the iron fist of the White Man in order to advance from feudalism and reaction, namely, you and Psy.

Psy

24th February 2012, 21:57

The paternalist racists are those who claim that Muslims need the iron fist of the White Man in order to advance from feudalism and reaction, namely, you and Psy.
The problem is Afghanistan is too late in joining the modern world thus there is no progressive capitalist class thus you need a external industrial engine to just bulldoze Afghanistan feudal means of production to make way for rapid industrialization fueled by external industrial capacity.

How can Afghans conquer their nature without a power like the USSR giving them the heavy equipment and engineering talent to do so?

It is nothing against Muslims, Egypt is a modern capitalist industrial power so it is no a problem of Afghanistan being full of Muslims it is a problem of Afghanistan still not having embraced capitalism, thus the USSR would have to deliver capitalism to Afghanistan before it could deliver them communism to them (even if the USSR itself was communist).

Yes, that was one of GOSPLAN's biggest mistakes. Because the GOSPLAN bureaucrats were afraid that if you computerized everything, they'd lose control.

The GOSPLAN bureaucrats losing control was the point, scientists and engineers researching cybernetics didn't see the bureaucrats as an obstacle getting in the way of progress.

But yes, even as large as COMECON was, it was definitely behind the imperialists in terms of labor productivity and technology, so imports from the West were necessary. Not only can't you build socialism in one country, you can't build it in a bunch of countries either, especially if those countries are socially and technologically more backward than the imperialist centers.

The Comecon had ahead of NATO in a number of fields, the problem was bureaucrats holding back the engineers and scientists.

And COMECON itself was a horrible example of what is wrong with the "socialism in one country" approach. Fearing Soviet domination, the Eastern Europeans insisted on a level of economic integration actually much less than that of the EEC or the EU!

So each country had its own separate steel or auto or whatever production, totally separate from all the others. So even at best, i.e. in East Germany, you had the "department store economy" approach, with East Germany trying to manufacture absolutely everything itself in half a country, inevitably leading to relative economic decline vis a vis western competition, a particularly burning question for East Germany of course.

-M.H.-
Yet there were those that wanted to actually properly plan for all of the Comecon through cybernetics and turning economic planning over the scientists.

GoddessCleoLover

24th February 2012, 22:22

A Marxist Historian

25th February 2012, 03:58

The paternalist racists are those who claim that Muslims need the iron fist of the White Man in order to advance from feudalism and reaction, namely, you and Psy.

Not the Israeli who calls them "dumb beasts"?

-M.H.-

robbo203

25th February 2012, 07:45

Yo don't need to, in fact you shouldn't, a waste of perfectly good electrons for foolery.-M.H.-

Ok since our anti-Marxist Historian is loathe to call a spade a spade let me take me take him to task over some of his more blatant evasions and non-sequiturs

1) That state enterprises in the Soviet Union were obliged to produce for profit he admits was case but this he claims was just for "book keeping" purposes and totally unlike the role of profit in a "capitalist economy" ( meaning western style capitalism) Really? How does he figure that out?

Seems he is clearly confused about the word "role" here. Soviet capitalism depended on profits every bit as much as western Western capitalism and it was not for no reason that state enterprises were legally obliged to pursue profit. Without profit - or more accurately surplus value creamed off by the central state - capital could not have been accumulated and, without that, Soviet industrialisation would never have happened. The difference between the Soviet system and western capitalism is merely that individual state enterprises did not necessarily go the wall if they failed to make a profit (although this is equally true of some subsidised concerns in the West which MH himself seems to admit is the case). However both soviet capitalism and western capitalism in the macro economic sense depended absolutely on profit even if, in a micro economic sense, there was more flexiblity - but only within limits - in the case of individual enterprises in Russia than in the West. Loss making enterprises in the Soviet Union were only able to remain afloat because they were supported by subsidies that actually derived from the suplus value produced by profitable state enterprises. and that, Mr Historian, is why profits were certainly not justr for book-keeping purposes. The whole apparatus of the statue not to mention the sumptuous lifestyles of the red bourgeoisie (including the soviet millionaires under Stalin - read R Bishop's pro soviet pamplet on the topic) depended on it

2) MH asks where did Marx mention anything about money or wage labour being abolished, the "day after the revolution? The answer is that of course he no more said it would be abolished the day after the revolution than he said that it wouldnt. But thats not really the point is it now? Though I think it is pretty clear that Marx envisaged the changeover in terms of it being the "most radical rupture" (Communist Mainfesto) with traditional property relations, in a sense the question is irrelevant. The proper question that ought to have been asked is would, if money or wage labour still existed the "day after the revolution", capitalism still exist. And the answer to that is clearly YES .
Which brings me to the point made by MH in relation to the quote from the Communist Manifesto - that
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."

Actually this is confirms everything Im saying. Capital still exists albeit in the process of being transferred to the proletariat. While I consider this part of the Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels advocacy of state capitalist reforms which they later played down (see one of the later prefaces) - to be a theoretical blunder the point does need to be made that in this scenario capital still existed and ipso facto capitalism

In any case we are talking here about the Soviet Union and the nature of the revolution that brought it into being. The assumption that MH is making is that this was a socialist revolution in intent and that it was only a matter of practical expediency that prevent a moneyless wageless socialist society being immediately implemented. That is clearly hogwash. Given that that vast majority of the population had no conception of, nor the desire to establish a socialist society in this sense (as freely admitted by Lenin) there is no way the Bolshevik revolution could have been called a socialist revolition. No way at all. Anyone who thinks otherwise is daydreaming fool. You cannot therefore use the argument that "you cannot expect to introduce socialism on the day after the revolution" to explain the continued existance of money and wage labour. Money and wage labour existed because the Boslheviks needed to develop capitalism and not in spite of wanting things otherwise
3) Then we have that quote from Engels and as usual MH completely misses the point about this quote
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"
I remind MH what he said. He said " You can't have a capitalist system with no capitalists, no corporations, no stock market," . The state that Engels is talking about here is not an individual capitalist nor a private corporation nor does it gamble on the stock market. But it is stilll nevetheless,in spite of all that in Engels words the "national capitalist" and the capitalist relationship is not done away with rather brought to a head. If MH cannot see the utter contradiction between what he said and what Engels is saying about the state here then he is even dumber than i thought. Engels is saying quite emphatically that it is not essental to capitalism that you have individual private capitalists legally holding equity. That is just one form of capitalism but there are others where the state takes on the role of the national capitalist

4) MH asserts "If you have a capitalist class who own the means of production, then it is a capitalist state. If not, as in the USSR, then not." Lets look at this shall we? . Lets agree that somebody must owned the means of production in the Soviet Union - they were not unowned.
Was it the workers? Well obviously not if you take a Marxian position on this though MH is no Marxist . For a Marxist the very existence of wage labour signifies the basic separation of the worker from the means of production. In what way was the fundamental economic postion of the Russian worker under Soviet capitalism any different from , say , a worker employed by a nationalised industry in the West?. None whatsoever. The Russian worker was an employee which, of course, presupposes an employer - just as wage labour presupposes capitalism and hence capitalism - and in the case of the Soviet Union those who played the role of employer were in effect the capitalist class - by logical inference

There was thus a capitalist class in a de facto material sense though not obviously in a de jure legalistic sense (though one can see why MH, as an anti-Marxist idealist, pins greater weight on the latter). Those who controlled that state effectively owned the means of production as a collectivity - a class - and with this de facto ownership went the absoute control they were able to exercise over the disposal of the economic surplus.

To suggest that the ordinary Russdia worker has the same relation to the means of production as an apparatchik is unbelievably dumb and since class defined by one's relation to the means of production it follows that we must be talking about two different classes. Stalin's idiotic claim that there were only twi clkasses in Russia - the workers and peasants - is about as un Marxist as you can get. A working class exists it can only exist in relation to its opposite, the capitalist class. And in the Soviet Union that capitalist class existed in a de facto sense not in de jure sense by virtue of its stranglehold on the state which was the basis of it imnmense economic power

MH contends "It's ownership that matters, not who runs things. As Marx explains in Das Kapital, management, the folk who run things, are employees of the capitalists, not capitalists themselves. ." Yes ownership matters and this is precisely what the Soviet capitalist class exercised but that does not mean that this precludes "running things" as well. In fact, Engels made the very point that in early capitalism, the capiualists themselves were often directly involved in the running their business and it was only latter with the rise of the joint stock company that you begin to see a serious bifurcation of these roles. One might only add that that a lot of the people who do run things today - certainly the CEOs of large corporations can be considered capitalists in their own right. In the US the average "compensation package" of CEOS among the top 500 corporations is about 19 million dollars

Zulu

25th February 2012, 08:08

Yes, that was one of GOSPLAN's biggest mistakes. Because the GOSPLAN bureaucrats were afraid that if you computerized everything, they'd lose control.

Although that might have been a factor it wasn't a decisive one.

The most decisive factor was integration of the USSR into the global market and the reintroduced principle of profitability. Computerization would have required considerable investment into research and development first, with the results of that not easily demonstrable to the party leadership at the stage of making that choice. So the choice was made for the rapid development of the newly discovered oil and gas fields in Siberia, which clearly promised hefty profits from foreign trade. Part of those profits were later used to improve the standard of living of the citizenry, uphold the MIC and part was invested into even more "Pipeline" development. Then the oil prices plunged, and there was the end of the Soviet Union.

Imposter Marxist

25th February 2012, 15:11

A Marxist Historian

25th February 2012, 20:16

Ok since our anti-Marxist Historian is loathe to call a spade a spade let me take me take him to task over some of his more blatant evasions and non-sequiturs

1) That state enterprises in the Soviet Union were obliged to produce for profit he admits was case but this he claims was just for "book keeping" purposes and totally unlike the role of profit in a "capitalist economy" ( meaning western style capitalism) Really? How does he figure that out?

Seems he is clearly confused about the word "role" here. Soviet capitalism depended on profits every bit as much as western Western capitalism and it was not for no reason that state enterprises were legally obliged to pursue profit. Without profit - or more accurately surplus value creamed off by the central state - capital could not have been accumulated and, without that, Soviet industrialisation would never have happened.

Surplus "value"? That is simply Robbo's assertion, which in circular fashion Robbo tries to "prove."

Yes, industrialization or any other form of social progress can't take place without some of the social surplus being devoted to it.

The social surplus takes the form of surplus value, and then profit, in a capitalist economy. Robbo tries to prove that the USSR was capitalist by the fact that the social surplus was accumulated to build factories etc.

Precisely how would factories etc. be built, not just in a socialist, but in a fully communist economy? The producers would decide to use some of the social surplus to build them, obviously, as Marx in fact explains at one point.

So Robbo's line of argument is just a clever bait and switch, saying that the social surplus in the USSR was "surplus value," and even profit since that's what for bookkeeping convenience it was called, so therefore it's capitalist, if nobody notices what he is up to.

The difference between the Soviet system and western capitalism is merely that individual state enterprises did not necessarily go the wall if they failed to make a profit (although this is equally true of some subsidised concerns in the West which MH himself seems to admit is the case). However both soviet capitalism and western capitalism in the macro economic sense depended absolutely on profit even if, in a micro economic sense, there was more flexiblity - but only within limits - in the case of individual enterprises in Russia than in the West. Loss making enterprises in the Soviet Union were only able to remain afloat because they were supported by subsidies that actually derived from the suplus value produced by profitable state enterprises. and that, Mr Historian, is why profits were certainly not justr for book-keeping purposes. The whole apparatus of the statue not to mention the sumptuous lifestyles of the red bourgeoisie (including the soviet millionaires under Stalin - read R Bishop's pro soviet pamplet on the topic) depended on it

Did bureaucrats often have a sumptuous lifestyle in the USSR? Of course. Was this in any way, shape or form necessary for the working of the system? Of course not, it was a bureaucratic corruption of the system.

Did the system function to extract surplus value from the working class so that bureaucrats could live like American capitalists? This is absurd. The sumptuous lifestyles of the bureaucrats, a deep dark secret in the USSR as opposed to in a capitalist country where they are celebrated, represented usually a pretty small part of the total social product.

The level of social inequality in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, when you had the absolute height of bureaucratic corruption, was vastly lower than in any capitalist country, with auto workers paid more than doctors and lawyers. Much more social inequality under Stalin, but I'm sure you had the occasional "communist millionaire" later, in the second superpower, at a time when billionaires were popping up like weeds in America. And now of course, with capitalist restoration, Moscow has almost as many billionaires as New York.

The height of social inequality in the USSR was under Stalin in the '30s, when this was necessary for Stalin precisely to buy off the old party members who had become bureaucrats, and even more so during the Great Terror, when the survivors needed powerful inducement to look the other way. Under Khrushchev, this was no longer necessary and increasingly politically counterproductive levels of bureaucratic privilege were reduced remarkably.

2) MH asks where did Marx mention anything about money or wage labour being abolished, the "day after the revolution? The answer is that of course he no more said it would be abolished the day after the revolution than he said that it wouldnt. But thats not really the point is it now? Though I think it is pretty clear that Marx envisaged the changeover in terms of it being the "most radical rupture" (Communist Mainfesto) with traditional property relations, in a sense the question is irrelevant. The proper question that ought to have been asked is would, if money or wage labour still existed the "day after the revolution", capitalism still exist. And the answer to that is clearly YES .
Which brings me to the point made by MH in relation to the quote from the Communist Manifesto - that
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling with class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."

Actually this is confirms everything Im saying. Capital still exists albeit in the process of being transferred to the proletariat. While I consider this part of the Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels advocacy of state capitalist reforms which they later played down (see one of the later prefaces) - to be a theoretical blunder the point does need to be made that in this scenario capital still existed and ipso facto capitalism

Well, things changed after 1848, and some of the measures listed in Marx's transitional program, such as a progressive income tax, become less relevant.

(Though in fact in the USSR in the '20s, the Left Opposition's advocacy of a progressive income tax on the peasantry, as opposed to the initially necessary to raise food production and avoid famine "flat" tax in kind of the NEP, with kulaks and poor peasants required to give the workers state equal amounts of grain, which Bukharin wanted to continue after it was no longer necessary, was a major issue. But then you have Stalin's compulsory collectivization position instead, what you advocate. Well, we all see how that worked out.)

Yes of course, capital still exists in a transitional economy in between capitalism and socialism. As Marx clearly explained, there would be such a period, during which the state form would be the dictatorship of the proletariat. Obviously (except to Stalinists and to Lucretia, an ISO supporter I'm arguing with on another thread), you will no longer have a dictatorship of the proletariat in a socialist society, as there no longer will be a proletariat in a classless society.

So for you this is all a major theoretical blunder by Marx? Especially the D of the P concept, which utterly contradicts everything you are arguing?

You are aware, I do hope, that Marx on several occasions said that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was his major theoretical innovation as opposed to previous socialists, what he considered the very essence of his ideas?

In any case we are talking here about the Soviet Union and the nature of the revolution that brought it into being. The assumption that MH is making is that this was a socialist revolution in intent and that it was only a matter of practical expediency that prevent a moneyless wageless socialist society being immediately implemented. That is clearly hogwash. Given that that vast majority of the population had no conception of, nor the desire to establish a socialist society in this sense (as freely admitted by Lenin) there is no way the Bolshevik revolution could have been called a socialist revolition. No way at all. Anyone who thinks otherwise is daydreaming fool. You cannot therefore use the argument that "you cannot expect to introduce socialism on the day after the revolution" to explain the continued existance of money and wage labour. Money and wage labour existed because the Boslheviks needed to develop capitalism and not in spite of wanting things otherwise

So then, since the population of Russia wasn't up for immediately creating a moneyless wageless economy, then therefore the Bolsheviks should have packed it in, and just stuck with ordinary capitalism, like the capitalist wanted and the Mensheviks advocated, and not confused people by talking about some sort of impossible socialism that nobody was into?

Is that what you're saying? It sure sounds like it. You are saying that capitalism in Russia in the year 1917 was inevitable.

So behind all of your radical rhetoric, in fact, at least in the context of Russia in the year 1917, you are a pro-capitalist reformist. Or maybe not even a reformist since you oppose fighting for reforms. Just pro-capitalist period.

A socialist revolution has to wait until society is ready for it, and shouldn't even be thought about in a backward society like Russia, where the people aren't ready for it.

Menshevism pure and simple, in practice in Russia leading to collaboration with the Whites vs. the Reds. Counterrevolution.

Socialism as pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.

3) Then we have that quote from Engels and as usual MH completely misses the point about this quote
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"
I remind MH what he said. He said " You can't have a capitalist system with no capitalists, no corporations, no stock market," . The state that Engels is talking about here is not an individual capitalist nor a private corporation nor does it gamble on the stock market. But it is stilll nevetheless,in spite of all that in Engels words the "national capitalist" and the capitalist relationship is not done away with rather brought to a head. If MH cannot see the utter contradiction between what he said and what Engels is saying about the state here then he is even dumber than i thought. Engels is saying quite emphatically that it is not essental to capitalism that you have individual private capitalists legally holding equity. That is just one form of capitalism but there are others where the state takes on the role of the national capitalist

Engels is engaging in abstract theoretical speculation here, not projecting something that could actually happen. Never here, or anywhere else, does he say that this is The Wave Of The Future. In fact what he does say, I don't have the pamphlet in front of me but that's what I recall, is that if this did happen the system would immediately collapse.

Absolutely, the state can take the role of a capitalist, happens all the time, in the USA with the post office for example. What usually happens is that the state is running unprofitable enterprises for the convenience of the capitalists running profitable enterprises, and the bills are paid by the working class taxpayers.

Sometimes this can take really extensive forms, especially in the Third World in a country which doesn't even really have a capitalist class yet. The classic example being Burma, where in the late 1950s virtually the entire industrial sector, such as it was, was state owned. This was because Burma didn't really have a capitalist class yet as such, so the generals running Burma, pretty much the same as the ones running it now, were trying to create a capitalist industry which they could then own as private capitalists. Which they do now.

4) MH asserts "If you have a capitalist class who own the means of production, then it is a capitalist state. If not, as in the USSR, then not." Lets look at this shall we? . Lets agree that somebody must owned the means of production in the Soviet Union - they were not unowned.
Was it the workers? Well obviously not if you take a Marxian position on this though MH is no Marxist . For a Marxist the very existence of wage labour signifies the basic separation of the worker from the means of production. In what way was the fundamental economic postion of the Russian worker under Soviet capitalism any different from , say , a worker employed by a nationalised industry in the West?. None whatsoever. The Russian worker was an employee which, of course, presupposes an employer - just as wage labour presupposes capitalism and hence capitalism - and in the case of the Soviet Union those who played the role of employer were in effect the capitalist class - by logical inference

So therefore , if workers are paid for their work, as opposed to working for nothing, then automatically by way of Robbo's chain of logical deductions based on a definition Marx used, and not anything else whatsoever, there was a capitalist class in Russia. Regardless of any material realities.

Marxists, I am compelled to point out, are materialists, not Hegelian idealists, who believe that you have an Absolute Idea of capitalism, as expressed in Marx's definition of wage labor.

You referred me to Marx's pamphlet, "Wage Labor and Capital," earlier. Had a look at it. It argues against your position over and over. In it he clearly defines, especially in the last chapter, the nature of capitalism, talking about how features such as unemployment are vital to the very nature and functioning of capitalism.

Well, there was almost no unemployment in the USSR, therefore it wasn't capitalist. Q.E.D.

And at no point in the pamphlet does he say, I repeat, that any society in which workers receive a paycheck is therefore capitalist. That is simply a false logical inference you've drawn from it.

And your notions are explicitly contradicted in Marx's actual writings on the subject we are talking about, the Manifesto, the critique of the Gotha program, etc. etc.

There was thus a capitalist class in a de facto material sense though not obviously in a de jure legalistic sense (though one can see why MH, as an anti-Marxist idealist, pins greater weight on the latter). Those who controlled that state effectively owned the means of production as a collectivity - a class - and with this de facto ownership went the absoute control they were able to exercise over the disposal of the economic surplus.

If they effectively owned it, in a capitalist economy they would have been able to buy and sell their shares of it, pass it down to their kids, etc.

Which they couldn't, so they effectively did not own it. Something they were intensively aware of, so they supported Gorbachev and then Yeltsin in a capitalist counterrevolution so that they could.

To suggest that the ordinary Russdia worker has the same relation to the means of production as an apparatchik is unbelievably dumb and since class defined by one's relation to the means of production it follows that we must be talking about two different classes. Stalin's idiotic claim that there were only twi clkasses in Russia - the workers and peasants - is about as un Marxist as you can get. A working class exists it can only exist in relation to its opposite, the capitalist class. And in the Soviet Union that capitalist class existed in a de facto sense not in de jure sense by virtue of its stranglehold on the state which was the basis of it imnmense economic power

MH contends "It's ownership that matters, not who runs things. As Marx explains in Das Kapital, management, the folk who run things, are employees of the capitalists, not capitalists themselves. ." Yes ownership matters and this is precisely what the Soviet capitalist class exercised but that does not mean that this precludes "running things" as well. In fact, Engels made the very point that in early capitalism, the capiualists themselves were often directly involved in the running their business and it was only latter with the rise of the joint stock company that you begin to see a serious bifurcation of these roles. One might only add that that a lot of the people who do run things today - certainly the CEOs of large corporations can be considered capitalists in their own right. In the US the average "compensation package" of CEOS among the top 500 corporations is about 19 million dollars

Who controls production at a big corporation? The CEO? No, he has lots of middle managers to actually run the factories, while he sits back and concerns himself with financial maneuverings, takeovers, stock manipulations, which are all about ownership and where all that surplus value goes, and not at all about how the factories are run on a day to day basis. Which is exactly why more and more he owns a chunk of the corporation, because ownership not control is where he operates these days.

Does the working class have the same relationship to the means of production as does the bureaucrat? Well no. The bureaucrat's position is more like that of a middle manager or a trade union bureaucrat in a capitalist enterprise than that of a rank and file worker.

Trotsky in Revolution Betrayed refers to the bureaucracy as a "petty bourgeois" layer.

This is actually a very important theoretical insight, necessary to explain the post-WWII phenomenon of petty-bourgeois radicals, classic pure model being Castro and Guevara in Cuba, constructing a bureaucratically deformed workers state after the collapse of the capitalist state in Cuba after the Soviet model without even, as in the USSR, first a workers revolution that bureaucratically degenerates.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

25th February 2012, 20:19

The entire Imperialist invasion of state capitalist Afganistan was just as bad, if not worse, as the American imperialist invasion of Afganistan. The only reason the State Capitaist Soviet russia invaded was to line the pockets of rich buerocrats in the Kremlin. Just as we see now in the usa.

We must support the working class, and oppose both sides, the US and the Soviets in that instance.

Agreed. Your name is indeed spaghetti, and your brains are spaghetti, if you think the USSR went into Afghanistan to make Brezhnev rich. Off the opium trade perhaps?

It was the Mujahedeen in the opium trade. I recall a little scandal in the late '80s that had to be covered up, when cops in LA on a drug raid found bricks of heroin stamped "Free Afghanistan"!

-M.H.-

Yehuda Stern

25th February 2012, 20:25

Not the Israeli who calls them "dumb beasts"?

-M.H.-
This is so weak it's actually hilarious. But then again, Spartacist slander always is.

A Marxist Historian

25th February 2012, 21:07

Although that might have been a factor it wasn't a decisive one.

The most decisive factor was integration of the USSR into the global market and the reintroduced principle of profitability. Computerization would have required considerable investment into research and development first, with the results of that not easily demonstrable to the party leadership at the stage of making that choice. So the choice was made for the rapid development of the newly discovered oil and gas fields in Siberia, which clearly promised hefty profits from foreign trade. Part of those profits were later used to improve the standard of living of the citizenry, uphold the MIC and part was invested into even more "Pipeline" development. Then the oil prices plunged, and there was the end of the Soviet Union.

Computer R&D, though not dirt cheap, required vastly less investment than building all those pipelines through Siberia. So counterposing one to the other is not the explanation as to why it didn't happen. I'll note that Psy's analysis as to that is not far different than mine.

Did the oil price plunge result in the collapse of the USSR? A great oversimplification. Cuba has managed to survive till this day despite a far greater economic blow inflicted on it by the Soviet collapse, the Cuban economy being extremely dependent on the Soviet before then.

Looking at the energy sector you are looking in the right direction, but to the wrong place. During the entire history of the USSR, coal had historically been the main energy source, and this was still basically true in the 1980s. And, even more importantly, the coal miners were the heart of the Soviet working class, and in particular the heart of support for the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalinism. Ever since the Shakhty trial in the late '20s, and then Stakhanov and Stakhanovism in the 1930s.

So when you had a fairly small rebellion in the coal country under Khrushchev in 1962, he was out on his ass soon thereafter, especially combined with the egg on his face from the Cuban missile crisis.

And in 1989, when the coal miners went into outright revolt, in many towns in the Don country re-establishing soviets as in 1917, kicking out the bureaucrats and running the towns themselves, that was the end of the Soviet Union, it lasted only two years after that and collapsed completely, now no longer even existing on the map.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a Trotskyist revolutionary party, the miners revolt just faded away, as the miners had no clear idea of what to do once they had taken control. In fact a number of them got persuaded that they would be better off under capitalism, as due to their key position in the economy they could leverage huge wage increases. They turned out to be wrong of course.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

25th February 2012, 21:21

The cold, hard fact is that Afghanistan had a very small working class at the time of the 1978 revolution, and the clear majority of the Afghani population support the mujahedin. As a result, the Soviet military was unable to pacify the country, and after nine years of warfare decided to cuts its losses and withdraw. It is interesting to note that by the early 1990s Najibullah had sought United Nations refuge in Kabul and the military dynamic had become one of warfare between the successors to the mujahedin of the 1980s versus the Taleban.
\
The reason the Soviets couldn't finish the job in the '80s wasn't due to overwhelming support for the Mujahedeen to the Afghan people, but to all that huge aid they got from the outside from the imperialists. Like those Stinger missiles shooting down Soviet helicopters America provided.

In fact, I think if Gorbachev had stayed the course, the insurgency could have been crushed. Things were in fact going fairly well militarily in the period just before the withdrawal, the regime was consolidating and its popular support was steadily increasing.

Evidence for this is what happened after the Soviet withdrawal. Did the Najibullah regime collapse? No. In fact it won its most important military victory of the whole conflict, the breaking of the siege of Jalalabad.

Which the Spartacists eyewitnessed, as part of their "aid heroic Jalalabad" worldwide fundraising campaign, after Najibullah turned down their offer to organize a "Lincoln Brigade" style workers expeditionary force to fight the Mujahedeen with them side by side.

Even without Soviet military support, the Najibullah regime was perfectly capable of maintaining itself independently, until the USSR collapsed and no military aid whatsoever was forthcoming, Yeltsin if anything supporting the Mujahedeen.

In short, despite imperialist propaganda to the contrary, Afghanistan was not a Soviet Vietnam.

-M.H.-

Psy

26th February 2012, 15:22

\
The reason the Soviets couldn't finish the job in the '80s wasn't due to overwhelming support for the Mujahedeen to the Afghan people, but to all that huge aid they got from the outside from the imperialists. Like those Stinger missiles shooting down Soviet helicopters America provided.

In fact, I think if Gorbachev had stayed the course, the insurgency could have been crushed. Things were in fact going fairly well militarily in the period just before the withdrawal, the regime was consolidating and its popular support was steadily increasing.

Evidence for this is what happened after the Soviet withdrawal. Did the Najibullah regime collapse? No. In fact it won its most important military victory of the whole conflict, the breaking of the siege of Jalalabad.

Which the Spartacists eyewitnessed, as part of their "aid heroic Jalalabad" worldwide fundraising campaign, after Najibullah turned down their offer to organize a "Lincoln Brigade" style workers expeditionary force to fight the Mujahedeen with them side by side.

Even without Soviet military support, the Najibullah regime was perfectly capable of maintaining itself independently, until the USSR collapsed and no military aid whatsoever was forthcoming, Yeltsin if anything supporting the Mujahedeen.

In short, despite imperialist propaganda to the contrary, Afghanistan was not a Soviet Vietnam.

-M.H.-
With rapid industrialization the USSR could have had a pacified Afghanistan within the decade they were by flooding Afghanistan with cheap commodities so the Mujahedeen struggles to generate surplus value and the Afghanistan masses can't vision living without commodities.

This is how feudalism lost to capitalism around the world so it was sure fire tactic for the USSR to snuff out the Afghanistan feudal class.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

16th March 2012, 05:52

Wars of invasion are the result of anti-democratic class societies.

L.A.P.

11th April 2012, 01:12

the Mujahedeen, ancestors of the Taliban

I just want to quickly point out that the Taliban aren't the successors of the Mujahideen. Al-Qaeda and the Northern Alliance (Islamist group that assisted the United States in the 2001 invasion) were the branch offs from the Mujahideen. After the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was overthrown, the Islamic State took over (which was governed by what would now be called the Northern Alliance). A war between factions erupted mainly between Al-Qeada and the Islamic State which ultimately was imperial competition between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The Taliban popped into the picture in 1996 with the purpose of protecting the interests of the Pashtun bourgeoisie and allied with Al-Qaeda to overthrow the Islamic State.

A Marxist Historian

14th April 2012, 01:15

I just want to quickly point out that the Taliban aren't the successors of the Mujahideen. Al-Qaeda and the Northern Alliance (Islamist group that assisted the United States in the 2001 invasion) were the branch offs from the Mujahideen. After the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was overthrown, the Islamic State took over (which was governed by what would now be called the Northern Alliance). A war between factions erupted mainly between Al-Qeada and the Islamic State which ultimately was imperial competition between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The Taliban popped into the picture in 1996 with the purpose of protecting the interests of the Pashtun bourgeoisie and allied with Al-Qaeda to overthrow the Islamic State.

The Taliban don't have direct organizational continuity with the Mujahedeen, but politically they do. Basically, the Northern Alliance were (and are) the corrupt druglords, whereas the Taliban got the religious fanatics, the people who actually believed Mujahedeen propaganda and weren't in it just for the CIA and heroin money. These two basic components of the Mujahedeen fell apart when they took power and immediately started fighting each other.

Al Quaida had only just come into existence in the early '90s, and was not really a major factor yet. It rose in importance *during* the civil war of the mid-90s between the Northern Alliance and the forces which very soon would gather around the Taliban, which was indeed organized by Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistani secret police, with the US staying neutral, as Clinton didn't really care which faction was in charge of Afghanistan at that point, as the USA totally lost interest in the country after Najibullah was overthrown.

Reason being that Al Quaida had inherited the abandoned CIA base at Tora Bora, which Osama Bin Laden had built for them. Al Quaida in Arabic does mean "the base" after all. So as the country was being blown to pieces, that fancy CIA base took on a certain military importance, and Al Quaida favoring the Taliban was one of the reasons the Taliban won, and they were grateful to Bin Laden afterwards.

-M.H.-

Imposter Marxist

20th April 2012, 07:00

pure imperialist dripping from the fangs of state capitalism. Cliff had a brilliant analysis of this event.

Cheung Mo

11th May 2012, 16:11

If you compare how women and how those who are typically marginalized in capitalist and Islamic societies fared under socialism with how they fare when ruled by any of the reactionary fucks backed by NATO or Washington, it's clear that anything that the Soviet Union did subsequent to Stalin's purges (which were both incredibly immoral and stupid) was beneficial to the evolution of human civilization. With the absence of an ideal socialist alternative and with the many deviations committed by the rightist traitors in Beijing, Soviet imperialism in the backward parts of the Middle East and Asia was a necessary precursor towards the civilization and liberation of the Afghan, Pakistani, and Arab peoples. The West's sins have made slaves out of untold millions of women and have left much of humanity mired in poverty and ignorance. Religion and poor education has left them oblivious to this sorry, unworthy state.

Tabarnack

11th May 2012, 17:06

It seems like the pro invasion people are on very shaky ground. A lot of the points and reasoning used in this thread could be equally applied to support the US invasion of Afghanistan and to a lesser degree, the broader "War on Terror."

On the first day in office Karzay signed a multi billion dollar deal to construct gas and oil pipelines with western oil companies to the greatest unexploited gas and oil gas reserve in existence in Turkmenistan, despite threats the Taliban always refused to consider such a deal.

The war on terror is a fairy tale to hide the true intentions of an imperial power.

Leftsolidarity

11th May 2012, 20:14