In the first week of May a new underground youth group plastered Kabul with hundreds of posters depicting former warlords as criminals and denouncing the U.S. and Karzai who gave them government positions in 2001.
April 28 was Mujahadin Victory Day, a national holiday celebrating the defeat of a Marxist government in 1992 by the fundamentalist warlords — known collectively as mujahadin — and the establishment of an Islamist state. For Afghans the day is a brutal reminder of the tens of thousands killed, the rape of thousands of women and children and the destruction of Kabul that followed as the seven groups that made up the U.S.-backed mujahadin fought for territory and power until driven to the north by Taliban forces four years later.
The youth group’s proclamation, “Enough is enough! We will no longer be a witness to your corrupt and predatory ways,” reflects the popular mood. Political parties are organizing, clandestinely and openly, to break the hold of the ruling class and the unbearable conditions of daily life.
Capitalism the Problem, Communism the Answer
Afghans once organized a movement, influenced by Marxist ideas that identified capitalism as the root of the vast economic disparity between rich and poor, advancing communism as the solution to end it. The idea that communism is needed to eliminate capitalist forces that are currently oppressing Afghans is taking hold again.
Starting in the 1960s among university students, a movement spread into the urban and rural working class. “We thought that money and wealth is concentrated in just a small class of the society,” said a former student at Kabul University, “that socialism is the only way for poor people to be equal, to receive what they work for.” Dedicated young men and women formed clandestine study circles that became a force in raising the political consciousness of the whole population. Peasant uprisings, labor stoppages, student strikes and demonstrations paralyzed the country in 1968.
Ten years later the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, (PDPA) the largest of the Marxist parties came to power. The popular new government cut food prices, raised wages, opened health clinics and schools, confiscated the land of the old aristocracy and redistributed it to the peasants. New laws ended the practice of bride price. Women and minorities were given equal rights.
All gains made when the PDPA was in power are gone. During those years, despite the intervention of the imperialists, and the PDPA’s own mistakes, from 1978 to 1992 conditions for Afghans improved tremendously: jobs were created and hospitals and schools built. Women made great gains: half the university students in the country were women; women were 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants.
Counter-revolutionaries, wealthy landowners and fundamentalists sabotaged the new programs and spread anti-government misinformation. They joined the jihad — religious war — against the communists which the CIA was secretly organizing in Pakistan, funded by the U.S and Saudi Arabia. Maoists, who followed the Chinese anti-Soviet line, calling the PDPA puppets of the Russians, joined them. Over the next ten years, at a cost of $40 billion, the U.S. recruited, supplied, and trained — militarily and ideologically — almost 100,000 jihadis or mujahadin from Afghanistan and 40 countries. (This included Osama bin Laden who bankrolled the jihad and later formed al Qaeda.)
The broader U.S. aim was to draw its imperialist rival, the Soviet Union, into a trap, a debilitating war. Russian forces went into Afghanistan in support of the government in December 1979, starting 33 years of war for Afghans as the country became the battleground of a 10-year proxy war between the USSR and the U.S. One million Afghans were killed, four million fled, many to Pakistan and Iran, and the economy and infrastructure of the country were devastated.
The legacy of these war years has left deep scars on Afghan society.
But although the promise of equality was never fulfilled, the idea of an egalitarian communist society motivated thousands of Afghans then and still does today. In Afghanistan and working class areas of Europe and the U.S. where many Afghan exiles live, Afghans are looking at why the old movement failed, in order to find a way forward.
They identify the egotism of some within the PDPA leadership, who focused on building a power base, dividing the party in a struggle between two factions rather than developing communist ideology.
The PDPA took power in an army coup organized by military officers, and although the party had an estimated 25,000 members, it lacked a strong base among the working class. Its attempts at a transformation of society was misunderstood by some and met with resistance, especially in the countryside, where wealthy landowners with religion and coercion dominated rural workers.
The party had close ties to the Soviet communist party, which professed anti-nationalism in theory but in practice made little effort to build an international working-class movement.
In the year after the PDPA took power certain corrupt leaders brought in supporters whose interest was personal gain, not building an egalitarian society. They imprisoned and killed those who opposed them including innocent civilians and under the banner of communism alienated the unorganized masses, making them open to the intensive, anticommunist propaganda of the Afghan ruling class, the U.S. and Arab fundamentalists.
The Afghan communists followed the theory of socialism as a stage to communism, practiced by the USSR and China. PLP, in “Road to Revolution 4,” analyzed that experience and concluded that socialism reverts back to capitalism.
Today PLP rejects the two-stage theory, nationalism, racism, sexism and the cult of leadership. We are building a mass international party to fight directly for communism and invite the heroic Afghan comrades who have kept the ideas of an egalitarian society alive to join us.
One World, One Flag, One Party.