Emine Engin and the revolution that never was/ 3

Submitted by AWL on 12 April, 2004 - 9:38

At the [Democratic] Conference…we must prepare a brief declaration in the name of the Bolsheviks, sharply emphasising the irrelevance of long speeches and of "speeches" in general, the necessity for immediate action in order to save the revolution, the absolute necessity for a complete break with the bourgeoisie, for the removal of the whole of the present government, for a complete severance of relations with the Anglo-French imperialists, who are preparing a "separate" partition of Russia, and for the immediate transfer of the whole power to the revolutionary democracy headed by the revolutionary proletariat.
Our declaration must consist of the briefest and bluntest formulation of this conclusion accompanied by a programme of proposals: peace for the peoples, land for the peasants, the confiscation of outrageous profits, and a check on the outrageous sabotage of production by the capitalists.

The briefer and blunter the declaration the better…

Having announced this declaration, and having appealed for decisions and not talk, for action and not resolution-writing, our whole fraction must proceed to the factories and the barracks. Their place is there; the pulse of life is there; the force that will save the revolution is there; the motive force of the Democratic Conference is there.

There, in impassioned speeches, we must explain our programme and put the alternative: either the Conference adopts it in its entirety, or else insurrection. There is no middle course. Delay is impossible. The revolution is perishing.

By putting the question thus, by concentrating our entire fraction in the factories and barracks, we shall be able to decide the best moment to launch the insurrection…

September 26-27 (13-14), 1917

(see also the Appendix: "Marxism and insurrection", Trotsky's speech to the Tzar's court, 1906)

The difference between a coup and a popular revolution

Look at Afghanistan in the light of Lenin's picture of conditions in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution and you see exactly why and in what ways what happened in Afghanistan was a revolutionary military coup and not a popular revolution.

In Russia the Bolshevik seizure of power was the culmination of profound social convulsions. Russia is covered by a great network of Soviets. Lenin says at the very start of his letter urging the Central Committee to prepare an insurrection, that a Marxist insurrection can rely neither on a conspiracy nor on a mere party, but on the advanced class, the working class, which is capable of carrying the masses with it - that is, capable of leading the whole plebeian population, or most of it, and in the first place the peasants.

He notes that the soviets have already seized power in some localities. When he talks of "loyal regiments", he means regiments of soldiers who have sloughed off military discipline, who are not under the control of their officers, who look to the soviets for leadership in supporting and defending the revolution.

There already is a mass nation-wide revolt by peasants, whose demands for land, which has been thwarted by the various Provisional Governments, can only be satisfied by the workers in power. He implies that if this were not so then there could be no talk of the workers seizing power: "that is the central reason for the popular character of the revolution", that is, for the continuing nation-wide discontent that gives the working class and the Bolsheviks their opportunity.

His discussion of the 'July Days' and of why it would have been wrong for the Bolsheviks to seize power then is equally instructive. The July Days were a spontaneous revolt by sections of the working class in Petrograd (St Petersburg). The Bolsheviks put themselves at the head of that movement, which they thought premature, in order to assure an orderly retreat with the least losses. Afterwards Lenin had to go into hiding and Trotsky was locked in a jail.

Why, according to Lenin, would it have been wrong for the Bolsheviks to have seized power in July? Because they still had not won the majority of the working class; they had not won the leadership in the soviets; there was no "rising revolutionary spirit amongst the people", who still had confidence in their parties and leaders; because, in July the army and the provinces would have marched on Petrograd, and the Bolsheviks could not have retained power. There is, he insists, such a rising revolutionary spirit now, after General Kornilov's attempt to suppress the revolution by a military coup in August.

The Bolsheviks had taken the lead in organising resistance to Kornilov's attempted coup against the Kerensky regime. Lenin would later put it like this: that they supported Prime Minister Kerensky, who was widely believed to be complicit in Kornilov's plot, "as the rope supports the hanged man". Thus they consolidated their leadership of the working class.

Could the differences with the situation in Afghanistan in April 1978 be more clear? The central aspect of the Saur revolution was that the Stalinists of the PDPA believed that taking power as they did would be enough: state force and coercion would do the rest. As I have already said, their idea here is the root idea of Stalinism in history (see "Afghanistan…").

Engin's summary of Lenin abstracts from everything in Lenin that describes the real revolutionary situation about which he was writing.

She culls from Lenin abstract recipes designed to make what Lenin wrote in 1917 fit the Afghan reality in 1978. To do that she has to fade out everything that is concrete about Russia and retreat up the ladder of abstraction so that her generalities will admit both the Afghan experience and the vastly different experience of the Bolsheviks. She fades out everything specific and instructive, assimilating the profoundly democratic Bolshevik revolution to the military-bureaucratic coup in Afghanistan.

Marxists proceed in precisely the opposite way. We translate generalisations by a Lenin or Marx or a Trotsky back into their concrete components; we then test and compare the summaries against the facts, details and dynamics of the current situation we are trying to analyse.

Her glosses on Lenin even introduce elements not in Lenin. Look at it again:

"Lenin enumerated the following as the guarantee of the Bolsheviks' success in an uprising: 1. We can launch a surprise attack from three points; 2. We have slogans that guarantee us support among the peasants; 3. We have a majority in the country; 4. The disorganisation among the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries is complete; 5. We are technically in a position to take power in Moscow; 6. We have thousands of armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd who could at once seize the Winter Palace, the General Staff building, the telephone exchange and the large printing presses.

"After enumerating these conditions for an uprising, Lenin said that, given these conditions, it would be treachery not to treat insurrection as an art."

Lenin does not write of a "surprise attack". The very opposite, in fact: he wants them to go to the Democratic Conference and publicly announce the Bolsheviks' intention to rise.

That they intended to rise, though not of course the details, was public knowledge long before Zinoviev and Kamenev told the press about it on the eve of the insurrection.

"We have slogans that guarantee us support among the peasants." That is probably what the leaders of the PDPA thought in April 1978. It is not at all what Lenin says.

There is nothing speculative or for-the-future in what Lenin writes. He describes an already seething mass of peasant revolutionary feeling, focused on the demand for the land; he notes that the peasants' traditional party, the SRs, will not win it for them (Victor Chernov was a SR leader).

This makes it possible for the working class to act as leader of the peasants.

By taking power the workers can clear away the bourgeois obstruction to the peasants getting what they are already in revolt to claim and in many places have already seized and fear will be taken from them, the land. Therefore, the workers can - in Trotsky's summary formula of his theory of "Permanent Revolution" - take the lead in reconstructing Russia on a new basis.

Lenin does not quite say that they have a majority in the country: he says they have won the majority in the working class, which is capable of leading all the working people.

Can "technique" be self-sufficient?

"Comrade Taraki had appraised the Afghan society on a scientific basis and had intimated [to] the party since the 1973 [Daud] coup that it was possible in Afghanistan to wrest… political power through a shortcut, [inasmuch] as the classical way in which the productive forces undergo different stages to build a society based on scientific socialism would take a long time. This shortcut could be utilised by working extensively in the armed forces. Previously the army was considered as the tool of dictatorship and despotism of the ruling class and it was not imaginable to use it before toppling its employer. However, Comrade Taraki suggested this too should be wrested in order to topple the ruling class."

[From the official biography of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a leader of the People's Democratic party of Afghanistan, published in August 1978]

"We are technically in a position to take power in Moscow"? The focus on technique is characteristic of the PDPA and its apologists.*

It describes Taraki, as quoted, above, not Lenin. In terms of technique, Lenin is urging the Bolshevik Central Committee to match the objective revolutionary possibilities, whose elements he itemises and analyses, above, by applying themselves to the technicalities of an insurrection: "treat insurrection as an art".

Lenin is not talking primarily about Moscow, but about Petrograd, the heart of the revolutionary working class. Etc., etc., etc. The distorting shadow of the PDPA military coup is heavy over Engin's account of Lenin on the eve of the October Revolution…

Emine Engin continues:

"We have mentioned the existence of a revolutionary situation in the country. The situation prior to the April Revolution was developing in the direction of a nation wide crisis.

"Firstly, the stirrings of a peasant uprising were felt in the rural areas just as in 1970-72. In 1978 The Times wrote as follows: 'The acute food shortage led to wide scale discontent and dissatisfaction in the first months of this year'."

Here, as throughout the whole exposition, what she cites and quotes does not prove, or even strongly suggest, what Emine Engin wants it to prove. In her translation, the Times reporter's account of "discontent and dissatisfaction" becomes "The stirrings of a peasant uprising were felt".

Uprising? In fact, apart from the many peasant risings against the Stalinist government in Kabul, there was no peasant rising - not even when the PDPA in power tried to rouse the rural poor against landlords and usurers.

It may be - I don't know - that the PDPA-army coup and the rallying of forces against it under the banner of Islam, helped smother what might have become a peasant movement, or even a peasant rising. But to translate the Times report into the 'stirrings of a peasant uprising' is like translating the news that someone who has been in a stupor is showing signs of being alive into a tale that he is already up and doing vigorous things. And Engin is writing four years later, when the full story is known…

She continues: "then the murder of Akhbar Khayber, one of the leaders of the PDPA, on 17th April l978 sparked off broad reaction, including a 50,000-strong funeral march as well as other demonstrations.

"Impatience with the Daud regime had been mounting within the army for a long time…The conditions for an uprising were maturing. It was not for nothing that the order for the uprising was connected with the arrest of the PDPA leaders. It is very obvious that this was to serve as the 'turning point' mentioned by Lenin. And so it was".

Part 4

Part 1
Part 2

* Footnote: Some anarchists said differently, that it was the intelligentsia taking power, but we will leave them alone, except to note that one possible consequence of arguments such as Engin and John-Jack employ, equating Afghanistan and Russia in 1917, is that when the penny drops about Afghanistan, etc., they will turn against the October Revolution…

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