Whatever Happened to “Stalin as Commander in Chief”?

IG Disappears Red Army Fight Against Islamic Reaction in Afghanistan

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 772, 11 January 2002.

The founding leaders of the Internationalist Group (IG) have, since defecting from our organization some years back, long and loudly proclaimed that they uniquely carry forward the revolutionary program of Spartacism. The manifest fraud of this posture is easily demonstrated by a mere glance at the objects of the IG’s political affections since its inception. These have ranged from trade-union opportunists in Brazil who turned to the bourgeois courts to preserve their positions in the leadership of a municipal workers union that includes cops; to an assortment of petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in the colonial and semicolonial countries; to a wing of the Stalinist bureaucracies in China and Cuba which the IG invests with revolutionary capacities.

Some years ago the IG’s central leader, Jan Norden, conjured up the notion that the geriatric remnants of the former Stalinist bureaucracy of the East German DDR deformed workers state—who had sold out the DDR to imperialism—were going to lead a “fightback” against the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution! As an appeal to the sensibilities of such types, Norden insisted on heralding Stalin himself as “commander in chief” of the Red Army forces that defeated Hitler’s Third Reich. (More accurately, the Red Army prevailed despite Stalin, who beheaded the Soviet general staff on the eve of World War II and whose constant attempts to appease the imperialists undermined the defense of the Soviet Union.) But now the IG is working a different side of the street. Seeking to ingratiate itself with the various reformists and renegades who have headed up the “peace” coalitions in response to U.S. imperialism’s terror bombing of Afghanistan, the IG has deep-sixed one of the few truly progressive acts of the Soviet Stalinists—the 1979-89 Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against CIA-backed Islamic reaction.

In our article “The Internationalist Group: Centrist Pathology” (WV No. 767, 26 October 2001), we noted that while the IG might make passing reference in writing to professed agreement with our call to “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” the story was rather different on the ground. At teach-ins and other coalition meetings, the IG ever-so-politely refrained from pointing out that outfits like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), as well as virtually every other self-professed “socialist” organization on the face of the planet, had stood on the side of imperialism and its mujahedin cutthroats against the Soviet Union. Then, at a November 28 Hunter College rally initiated by the IG to protest plans by the CUNY administration to drive out “illegal” immigrant students through extortionate fee hikes—part of the anti-immigrant witchhunt that has accompanied the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan—the IG completely disappeared any and all mention of the Red Army in Afghanistan.

Those Who Can’t Defend Past Gains Will Never Fight for New Ones

The Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club endorsed the November 28 protest, which was called around the slogans “Down With CUNY’s Anti-Immigrant ‘War Purge’! Stop Racist Tuition Hike and ‘Student Data Collection System’!” As we stressed in the placards carried by our contingent, in speeches by SL and SYC members and in a leaflet distributed to the protest (see “Defend Immigrant Rights—For Class Struggle Against U.S. Capitalist Rulers!”, WV No. 771, 28 December 2001), the defense of these students and of immigrant rights is critical to combatting the “national unity” chauvinism wielded by the American imperialist rulers to further their rapacious military adventures abroad and their class war against the working class and oppressed at home.

United-front actions are also vital to providing a platform for the contention of different political programs and strategies, the kind of sharp political debate that is necessary to raising the political consciousness of the working class, youth and others who are looking for the way to successfully combat the brutal depredations of capitalist imperialism. In her speech to the protest, SYCer Anna Woodman stressed:

“Opposition to imperialism means defending those gains that workers have already made. That means unconditional military defense of China, and it meant defense of the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers states. All of the left groups now talk about how the U.S. armed and funded the mujahedin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the ’80s. But what they don’t say is that they all capitulated to the imperialist anti-Soviet war drive, with, for example, the ISO hailing the mujahedin as ‘freedom fighters.’ Only we Trotskyists said: ‘Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!’”

This is hardly an academic question or one irrelevant to the defense of the working class and the rights of all the oppressed today.

From the time of the 1917 October Revolution, the first and only successful workers revolution in history, the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and the forces of counterrevolution was the touchstone of the class struggle internationally. As James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, put it in 1939:

“The Russian question has been and remains the question of the revolution. The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality.”

Despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union—the product of relentless imperialist pounding militarily and economically, the isolation of the Soviet Union and the defeat of revolutions elsewhere, particularly Germany—it remained a workers state based on the planned economy and collectivized property established by the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought enormous gains to workers, peasants, women and national minorities. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless ambition to destroy the Soviet workers state.

The “Russian Question” Pointblank

The mujahedin insurgency in Afghanistan in the late 1970s was directly triggered by the modest measures taken by the Soviet-backed PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) regime to free women from feudal tyranny, illiteracy and the stifling head-to-toe veil (burqa) that symbolizes their degraded status and enforced isolation from all social life. At the request of the PDPA government, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 to combat the Islamic reactionaries and to secure the USSR’s crucial southern flank. Under Democratic president Carter, Washington seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War offensive, bankrolling and arming the woman-hating Islamic fundamentalists in the largest CIA covert operation in history.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan offered the prospect of extending the gains of the October Revolution to the hideously oppressed peoples of that country. Although certainly not the intent of the Kremlin Stalinists, the intervention in Afghanistan cut against their nationalist, anti-Marxist dogma of “building socialism in one country,” inspiring many in the Soviet population with a sense of internationalism. This was crucial to our perspective of fighting for workers political revolution in the Soviet Union to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return to the proletarian internationalist program of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party.

On their side, the imperialists aimed not only to kill as many Red Army soldiers as possible but to wield Islamic fundamentalism within the historically Muslim regions of the USSR as a spearhead for counterrevolution. And indeed, when Gorbachev, trying to placate the imperialists, pulled the Red Army out of Afghanistan in 1989, this was not only a deadly betrayal of Afghan women but a direct precursor to capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself.

The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a world-historic defeat for the international working class. In East Europe and the former Soviet Union, capitalist counterrevolution has brought an unparalleled plunge into mass immiseration, disease and fratricidal nationalist bloodletting. It also brought about a much more dangerous world. Without the counterweight of the Soviet Union, the U.S. imperialists have since been riding high in the saddle as the “world’s only superpower,” waging terror wars from Iraq to the Balkans to Afghanistan. The domestic price being paid for the imperialists’ victory in the Cold War is the all-sided class war against the working class, immigrants, blacks and the poor, which has been dramatically ratcheted up with the imperialists’ “war on terror.”

IG Deep-Sixes Red Army

Those self-professed “Marxists,” like the ISO and most of the rest of the fake left, who stood on the side of imperialism and its Frankenstein monsters in Afghanistan should be scathingly exposed as nothing other than reformist servants of the capitalist order. That is exactly what we did in our speeches, propaganda and placards at the Hunter protest. An understanding of the dearly bought lessons of the past is crucial to the consciousness that is necessary if the proletariat is to be mobilized in the struggle to shatter the rule of capitalist imperialism. For revolutionary Marxists, polemical combat against the various reformists and renegades who make pretensions to Marxism is critical to breaking the false consciousness that serves to tie the working class to its “own” bourgeoisie.

Not so for the IG. Whatever they may on occasion write in their propaganda stands in sharp contrast to their efforts to conciliate the reformists, liberals and others on the ground. In his speech to the protest, the IG’s “commander in chief” Norden lamely declared: “We fought against the Taliban, we fought against the Islamic fundamentalists when the United States was pushing them.” Completely eliminated was any mention of the Red Army intervention or that the “we” was the Spartacist League, of which Norden was a member at the time. And we stood with the Red Army against imperialism as part of our unflagging commitment to the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union.

What was left out of Norden’s speech was hardly an oversight. Not one of the IG’s placards, not one of their speakers and none of the propaganda they produced for the Hunter protest said a word about the Red Army or the Russian question. Subsequently, an entire 32-page IG pamphlet (December 2001) devoted to the CUNY protest went so far as to edit out any reference to the Soviet intervention in the SL speech at the rally and completely eliminated the SYC speaker.

Obviously the IG did not want to offend those like the ISO, the League for the Revolutionary Party or the Revolutionary Communist Party who had endorsed and attended the rally and who to a man were on the imperialist side against the Red Army in Afghanistan. Here is a textbook example of what Trotsky spoke to in his article “Centrism and the Fourth International” (Writings, 22 February 1934): “A centrist always remains in spiritual dependence on rightist groupings and is inclined to cringe before those who are more moderate, to remain silent on their opportunist sins and to color their actions before the workers.” As Trotsky also noted, the centrist—revolutionary in words, reformist in deeds—seeks to cover his tracks by reserving his polemical fire for the Bolshevik-Leninists. This, too, aptly characterizes the IG which, while not wanting to remind the reformists of their criminal embrace of the aims of the imperialist rulers, deliberately lies that the Spartacist League capitulates to jingoist warmongering in the U.S.

This is for the benefit of distant cyberspace audiences who cannot ascertain the truth on the ground. The IG’s utter silence in front of several hundred protesters at Hunter College on the force that could have defeated the forces backed by U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan—the Soviet Red Army—certainly demonstrates that its oh-so-revolutionary calls for the defeat of U.S. imperialism is so much hot air.

In attacking our propaganda on the U.S. war against Afghanistan, the IG’s Internationalist No. 12 (Fall 2001) fulminates against our call for “Class Struggle Against Capitalist Rulers at Home,” declaring that the “emphasis on ‘at home’ is counterposed to the call to defeat the imperialists abroad.” But the IG’s call to “Defeat U.S. Imperialism” in its war against Afghanistan is nothing more than empty rhetoric. The notion that the world’s most powerful imperialist country was going to be defeated at the hands of tribal forces in one of the world’s most backward countries is truly deranged. The easy win for the U.S. in Afghanistan demonstrated that the Taliban was a creature of Pakistani intelligence services, with no base of local support. And while dispatching Special Forces to track down bin Laden, U.S. imperialism is not interested in a large-scale deployment of American ground troops in Afghanistan. Indeed, the international “peacekeeping” force has British, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and other troops, but not an American among them.

The IG’s elevation of military struggle against imperialism over and above the political struggle to mobilize the proletariat to smash imperialism from within is simply a measure of its despair in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. Norden has always had proclivities toward a fatuous optimism about the capacity of forces very distant from Trotskyism, or the proletariat for that matter, to “struggle” in some successful measure against the depredations of U.S. imperialism. Correspondingly, this means seriously downplaying the crucial and related factors of political consciousness and material economic reality.

The slogans used by the revolutionary party to lead the working masses to the seizure of state power are necessarily conjunctural. In 1941, when James P. Cannon, leader of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and 27 other Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders were tried for their opposition to U.S. imperialism in World War II, an ultraleft critic in the Fourth International, Grandizo Munis, chastised Cannon for not stressing during his trial the need for the “organized violence of the poor masses.” Cannon replied that it was foolish to engage in such phrasemongering. Noting that the SWP was still a small party whose task was to organize the proletarian masses to carry out a revolution, he referred to Bolshevik leader Lenin’s writings in May 1917. Having already won the Bolshevik Party leadership to the perspective of “All Power to the Soviets!” and no support to the bourgeois Provisional Government, which was in power following the fall of the tsar in February, Lenin argued that this did not mean that the Bolsheviks should immediately raise the slogan “Down with the Provisional Government!” He wrote that since the Bolsheviks were still a minority in the working class, “such a slogan is either an empty phrase, or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character.”

Today, the IG hotly denies that there has been any retrogression in class consciousness following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. But they themselves are the product of a climate in which it is preached that the theory and program of Marxism have proved to be a “failed experiment.” The IG’s politics are those of accommodation to the existing consciousness, trying to give a “progressive” veneer to all manner of alien class forces and retrograde ideologies. Our politics serve a different purpose. As we wrote in our leaflet for the Hunter demonstration: “Unlike the revolutionary phrasemongers of the IG, we fight to awaken class combativity in the proletariat, and through patient education and in the course of class struggle to imbue the working class with revolutionary class consciousness.” In its own way, the very existence of the IG as “death of communism” centrists underlines the vital necessity of this task, including and especially polemical combat to remove the obstacles on the road to the successful seizure of state power through proletarian socialist revolution.