Afghanistan, Imperialism and Petty-Bourgeois Moralism

Troops from the US, UK and other imperialist states are withdrawing from Afghanistan. How should Marxists react?

When imperialist forces went into Afghanistan, much as when they went into Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, there were those that supported such “liberal intervention”, seeing it as similar to the action of “democratic imperialism”, in the 1930's, in undertaking an imperialist war against the forces of totalitarian imperialism, in the shape of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy. On the other hand, there were those that opposed such intervention, on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, and support for the principle of “self-determination”. There were also those, like the AWL, who claimed that whilst they were not calling for such intervention, nor would they oppose it, or call for it to end, because they saw it as supporting an end which they supported, i.e. the overthrow of undemocratic, vile regimes. Those holding these views ranged from neo-cons at one extreme on the right, through various strands of liberal and social democrat, to supposed Trotskyists at the other extreme.

What all of these responses had in common is that they were based upon petty-bourgeois moralism and idealism, rather than materialism. Its no surprise that the various conservatives and liberals, in their response, had no concern for what was in the interests of the working-class, but that should have been the starting point for any socialist response to events. It wasn't. In the end, all of these responses, be they support for or opposition to intervention, from the conservative right to the “Trotskyist” left, all amounted to some form of liberalism. That is they all amounted to calls for some kind of capitalist solution. The only question was whether it was a bourgeois-liberal solution based upon the interests of large-scale capital, or a petty-bourgeois liberal solution, based upon the interests of small producers. The response to the withdrawal of imperialist forces from Afghanistan now results in the same divisions, but all of which amount to the same petty-bourgeois moralism, subjectivism and idealism on the part of the Left.

On the one hand, we have the “anti-imperialists” who welcome the withdrawal of imperialist forces, irrespective of the fact that the immediate consequence is that the mediaevalist forces of the Taliban are set to reinstall themselves. That is not surprising, because, as in the case of Iraq, in order to oppose imperialism, they were prepared to side with the reactionary forces of political Islam, just as in Lebanon, the SWP proclaimed, “We are all Hezbollah Now!” On the other hand we have those, like the AWL, along with assorted liberals and social democrats, who wring their hands at the fact that the imperialist forces are leaving, and denounce them for doing so, having failed to establish a viable state, and bourgeois democracy, and who, now, in leaving are handing the Afghan people up into the hands of the Taliban barbarians. As I have pointed out before, these are simply two sides of the same petty-bourgeois moralist coin. Both the AWL and the SWP claim adherence to the tradition of the petty-bourgeois Third Camp of Burnham and Shachtman, though the AWL was late in adopting that tradition as the consequences of its gradual petty-bourgeois degeneration played out.

None of the ideas being presented by these organisations are new, the series I posted some time ago on Trotsky's writings on the Balkan Wars, covers all of the ground in detail, but also the current series on Lenin on Economic Romanticism, provides all of the history and analysis of the Marxist response to such petty-bourgeois moralism, as an ideological strand in the workers movement, going back to Marx's analysis of Sismondi. I haven't been posting that series accidentally, just as an example of the practical application of Marx's theory of historical materialism, in relation to the development of capitalism in Russia, though it is important for that too, but precisely to polemicise against that strand of petty-bourgeois moralism that runs through the labour movement today.

In Lenin's polemics against the Narodniks and Legal Marxists, he attacks the idealist and subjectivist philosophy that underpins their politics. That idealist philosophy asserts that nothing is inevitable, and that whatever the human mind can conceive can be converted into reality. This is a version of the Hegelian idealist dialectic, by which history is created by the evolution of the idea within Men's heads, and its subsequent realisation. It is supplemented by Kantian Moralism, in which these ideas develop on the basis of a moral law founded upon universalisable principles, which create a Categorical Imperative. Marx, Engels, Lenin and others explain what is wrong with this. Firstly, a process of development of ideas in human minds undoubtedly does take place, but any such abstract process must have a starting point, and that starting point is what exists in the real world. Secondly, any such abstract process of development remains purely abstract unless conditions exist, or can be created in the real world that enables the resulting ideas to be realised.

Humans had the idea of flight from early on, but were unable to realise it. Leonardo, even drew up the plans for such manned flight, but the machine could not be constructed in a way that would work, given the reality of the machines and materials, and level of engineering available at the time. The Greeks developed the concept of democracy, but the reality of it was that it was only possible for a small minority of free citizens, who themselves rested upon the existence of a large number of slaves.

Thirdly, the reality that presents itself is not the same for everyone in society, so that the idea of universalisability falls down. The reality faced by the Greek slave is not the same as that of the Greek slaveholder, that of the serf not that of the landlord, that of the wage labourer not that of the capitalist. Each of these different classes can form principles that are logically derived from their position in society, but each of which are antagonistic to the logically derived principles of other classes.

So, its true that, taken in the abstract, nothing is inevitable, but the truth is always concrete, and so when Marxists talk about inevitability they do so only in relation to reality as it exists, and not as someone might want it to be in order to assuage their moral sensibilities. There was no point daydreaming about manned flight in the Middle Ages, and constructing schemas based upon it, when, in reality the technological development required for it was still several centuries in the future; there was no point constructing schemas of bourgeois-democracy when society was still dominated by feudalism, and required several centuries of capitalist development before the principles of bourgeois-democracy could be realised. And, that is of particular relevance when considering the reality of Afghanistan, today, a society, which not only is precapitalist, but indeed, is barely even feudal!

One of my uncles was born in Afghanistan, near the start of the last century. His father had gone there as one of the first pilots in the British Royal Flying Corps. But, long before then, the British Army had operated in Afghanistan, a country that has been constantly invaded and occupied by foreign powers, and which has been characterised by its backwardness and division into regions and districts ruled by competing warlords. Only a quarter of the population lives in urban areas, the large majority are engaged in peasant agriculture. Afghanistan has never presented for colonialism or for imperialism, even the kind of incentives that India provided. Its main function has been strategic given its global location. It played that role through history from the time of Alexander the Great, through the Persians, to the British and more recently the Russians, and then the US.

Colonialism was based upon the symbiotic alliance between the landed aristocracy and merchant capital. One the one hand, the landed aristocracy obtained huge swathes of land, from which they obtained additional rents. Their family involvement in the financial oligarchy also provided them with large revenues from the financial of foreign ventures and trade. On the other hand, the merchant capitalists obtained protected foreign markets into which they could sell manufactured commodities, and from which they could obtain cheap raw materials and foodstuffs. But, large colonial administrations and armed encampments were costly deductions from the revenues they obtained from such activities.

Imperialism, on the other hand, is based upon industrial capital, and instead of obtaining its revenues from unequal exchange, it obtains it directly from the appropriation of surplus value in production. But, that presents several limitations. In order to obtain such profits, industrial capital needs to be able to operate on a large scale. That requires also adequate infrastructure in the area in which it is to start production; it requires a large enough workforce educated, trained and prepared to sell its labour-power as a commodity; it often requires the supply of locally produced components and other small industry, etc. Without all of these other requirements, production cannot be undertaken in a way that is more profitable than investment in other more developed economies. Indeed, that is why most direct investment from imperialist economies goes to other imperialist economies, and not to newly industrialising economies, let alone backward states such as Afghanistan.

Imperialism also still requires provision of raw and auxiliary materials, and to the extent that many of these reside in countries such as Saudi Arabia, it relies on an accommodation with the feudal ruling class in those countries. Its true that Afghanistan is also reported to have large reserves of oil and gas, as well as large deposits of other minerals, whose value is estimated to run into at least $1 trillion. But, the geography of Afghanistan makes development of these resources problematic. In any event, even large scale development of these mineral resources would not solve the problem of Afghan economic development, such as to create a modern industrial economy, as the material basis even for the establishment of a functioning bourgeois-democracy. Even the economic development that has occurred in Egypt, Syria and so on, let alone Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, has not been sufficient for that. Oil and other mineral extraction, today, is a highly capital intensive industry that requires few workers. Those workers that are required to operate the advanced technology involved have to be highly educated and skilled, many of them being foreign rather than domestic workers, when employed in these less developed economies.

As well as the skilled workers being imported, the technology is also imported, rather than being manufactured domestically, a difference with say the introduction of railways in India, which led to the development of Indian steel and engineering production, as well as the creation of a skilled Indian working-class employed on the railways and these attendant industries. But, for industrial development in an economy, it is precisely these ripple effects, and market expansion that are required. For industrial development to take hold in Afghanistan, and so to create the sizeable working and middle class required for a viable and functioning bourgeois democracy, let alone socialism, what is required is not the exploitation of its natural mineral resources, but the development of large-scale industrial production itself, yet, there is no material basis for any such development. If we take say motor cars, there is no large domestic market for them, without first a development of a sizeable working and middle class. Nor does Afghanistan offer any benefits of locating such production there for export. Car production itself nowadays uses mostly robots, and requires just a small number of highly educated workers to monitor and programme the robots, and these are more readily had in other newly industrialising economies where the problems of civil unrest, ever present in Afghanistan, do not exist.

So, there is no material basis for imperialism to invest in Afghanistan, and it hasn't. Even in terms of the licences for mineral extraction of the now very valuable lithium and rare earth resources, the developed economies have shown little interest, most of them being taken up by the neighbouring regional powers. Imperialism only involves itself for one of two reasons, either there are significant profits to be made, or else a strategic interest is involved. It was only for the latter reason, following 9/11, that imperialism involved itself in Afghanistan in the first place. The wailing from various liberals about imperialism now leaving Afghanistan, simply emphasises their petty-bourgeois politics, based upon moralism, rather than any scientific analysis based upon materialism, and class interest.

The reality is that, given the lack of any strategic or financial interest in Afghanistan, it was inevitable that imperialism would withdraw at some point. The only surprise is that it has taken this long. For US and European imperialism, there is a distinct advantage. It throws the burden on to Russia and China. When the civil unrest erupted, in 2011, in the Middle East and North Africa, it placed the burden on the EU, and the same was true about the unrest that erupted in Central and Eastern Europe. It strengthened US imperialism, at a time when EU imperialism was being strengthened. Similarly, instability in Afghanistan, a policy that the US previously encouraged when it used its proxy in Pakistan as a channel to its protégé Osama Bin Laden and the Mujaheddin, places the burden on Russia and China. China, in particular, tied up dealing with any potential insurgency from Afghan based rebels, will be less able to expand its influence in the South China Sea, and Pacific, the area to which the US has now directed its global economic and strategic attention.

The actions of imperialism in withdrawing from Afghanistan are not then somehow irrational, but rather, given the material conditions that exist, were inevitable, and a logical expression of its class interest. For any Marxist to try to argue that this was not inevitable, that somehow, imperialism could change its spots, and act as some kind of moral saviour of the world, acting against its own class interest, is simply to illustrate the such a “Marxist” has abandoned the basic teachings of Marxism and of historical materialism, as the scientific study of sociology and social development. It is to illustrate that they have become simply a petty-bourgeois moralist, whose ideas and politics are driven by a moralistic idealism, in which everything is possible if only we wish for it hard enough! It is a moralistic politics of schema mongering based upon what could be, rather than what is. And, for all the reasons that Marx set out against Sismondi and Proudhon, that he and Engels set out against Durhing, and that Lenin set out against the Narodniks and Legal Marxists, such moralism and idealism is necessarily reactionary.

On the one hand, the followers of this Third Camp moralism and idealism amongst the “anti-imperialists” want to construct a schema in which, like Sismondi and the Narodniks, some alternative path to development for economies exists that avoids the involvement of large scale imperialist capital, in the form of direct investment from multinational companies. For all their socialistic verbiage, and “anti-capitalist” rhetoric, this too amounts merely to liberalism. As Lenin points out, in relation to the Narodniks, it does not, in reality amount to a “non-capitalist” path of development, but merely a capitalist path of development that is stunted and deformed, by holding it back, attempting to confine it within limits.

On the other hand, the followers of this Third Camp moralism and idealism amongst those like the AWL, who want to construct a schema in which imperialism acts as the vehicle of development for these newly industrialising economies, still more so the backward economies such as Afghanistan, are like Proudhon. They want all of the “good” elements of such development, but none of the “bad” elements that necessarily goes along with it. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx describes this approach of Proudhon. For Proudhon, Marx says, the dialectic is understood as every phenomenon having a good side and a bad side, the problem being therefore, to preserve the good and discard the bad.

“Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say, we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations...

What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”

In other words, to put this in the context of Afghanistan, today, its theoretically possible that imperialism could intervene in Afghanistan in such a way as to develop its economy, and turn it into a modern, 21st century industrial economy. To do so, it would have to direct large scale multinational companies to invest in production in the country. In order to make that viable, it would have to spend billions of dollars modernising the infrastructure of the country in terms of roads, railways, telecommunications and so on. It would have to pour money into education and a welfare state on a level that it has no even done in the US itself, to bring the population up to an adequate level to work in these multinational companies, and modern production. Having done all that, then, in several generations time, it would have created the sizeable working-class, and middle class upon which a modern, bourgeois, social-democratic state can be built. In the meantime, it would have to install a vicious and oppressive colonial state apparatus that would resort to any means necessary to appropriate the absolute and relative surplus value required for the accumulation of capital, required for such a transition, it would have to deny all basic individual and civil rights to inhabitants in order to operate unconstrained in such a project.

Of course, that is not what the liberals who propose that imperialism transform Afghanistan have in mind. More significantly, its not what imperialism is going to do, because it has no immediate obvious interest in undertaking such a course of action. It has no categorical imperative to industrially develop Afghanistan, and it has plenty of other more attractive locations across the globe into which it can plough investment, and obtain a return, without any of the costs and trouble involved in such a colonial project in Afghanistan.

And, for liberals, in any case, such a project is a strange application even of the bourgeois-democratic concept of national self-determination. That concept, at a time when the creation of nation states was still, in some parts of the world, a progressive development, was founded upon the idea that each nation should be able to rule itself free from outside control. As Trotsky wrote, in relation to the Balkan Wars, it means that the peoples of that nation, or federation of nations, should be able to determine their own future. It does not mean that some outside power should undertake that function for them. That was why Trotsky opposed the Russian liberal interventionists, like Miliukov, who wanted Russia to intervene in the Balkans against the Ottomans.

“The Balkans for the Balkan peoples! It is necessary to vindicate the possibility for these peoples themselves to settle their own affairs, not only as they wish and see fit but also by their own strength, in the land where they are established. This means that European democracy has to combat every attempt to subject the fate of the Balkans to the ambitions of the Great Powers. Whether these ambitions be presented in the naked form of colonial policy or whether they be concealed behind phrases about racial kinship, they all alike menace the independence of the Balkan peoples. The Great Powers should be allowed to seek places for themselves in the Balkan Peninsula in one way only, that of free commercial rivalry and cultural influence...

Democracy has no right, political or moral, to entrust the organisation of the Balkan peoples to forces that are outside its control – for it is not known when and where these forces will stop, and democracy, having once granted them the mandate of its political confidence, will be unable to check them...

Bismark once said that the whole Balkan Peninsula was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. We too can say today: If the leading parties of the Balkans, after all their sad experience of European intervention, can see no other way of settling the fate of the Balkans but a fresh European intervention, the results of which no one can foreordain, then their political plans are indeed not worth the bones of a single infantryman from Kursk. That may sound harsh, but it is the only way that this tragic question can be seen by any honest democratic politician who thinks not only of today but also of tomorrow.”

Afghanistan is a country of 40 million people. Its economic, social and political development, is way behind that, even of the Balkans more than a century ago.  If the liberal principle of self-determination is to mean anything then it is that they should be left to determine their own future. If the consequence of that is again that they determine to have the Taliban run the country, then that is equally the consequence of self-determination. If 40 million Afghans cannot determine their future in a way that prevents the Taliban from coming to power, then how can it be expected that several thousand foreign troops could, or even should do so?

After all, we have a recent example. In 2011, about ten thousand Libyan rebels, many being jihadists recently back from Iraq, rose up against Gaddafi. Without the support of massive bombing by imperialist air forces, and the backing of thousands of special forces troops from the Gulf and elsewhere, these rebels would have had no possibility of victory. When that imperialist intervention did overthrow Gaddafi, what was the consequence? The reality imposed itself. The rebels were shown to be insignificant, there was no social base for any alternative regime to that of Gaddafi. The country descended in civil war and warlordism between these various reactionary factions. Economic and social chaos ensued, leaving the Libyan people in a far worse position than they had been in under Gaddafi!

But, the liberals and moralists of right and left never learn. They are like the definition of idiocy described by Einstein, they keep repeating the same experiment over and over again, each time thinking that the result will be different.