Statement of Initiating The Movement of the New Communism of Afghanistan

August 30, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Editors’ Note: We received the following statement from The Movement of the New Communism of Afghanistan (JKNA/NCMA) dated August 2021. This is an inspiring call for a much-needed emancipatory pole, which is a very positive development. We are posting to share with our readers and make the statement available to all those who want to see this known more broadly, including everyone horrified by the situation in Afghanistan now. This is an unofficial translation into English by revcoms.us translators, and we have tried to be as accurate as possible, maintaining the integrity of the original statement. We take responsibility for any lack of clarity or errors in translation. We have added some explanatory footnotes, and insertions in the text for accessibility to a wider audience. The original Farsi version of the statement is available online here and in PDF format here.

What is JKNA¹
The JKNA (The Movement of the New Communism of Afghanistan) is an initiating core—a group of revolutionary communist men and women who cannot stand the ugliness and crime of the present world. We have gathered to raise our voices, to say first and foremost: “No! This world is not fit for any human being”:

• A world of one billion hungry people, deprived of the right to eat and billions of people living in poverty, unemployment and ruins! The world of my children and yours, who are doomed to slavery and forced labor instead of happiness, school and play! The world of a few thousand capitalists who rule over billions of people on earth.
• A world of hundreds of millions displaced, turned to eternal refugees roaming the roads, on the borders and margins of society; a world of children afraid of bombings and shelling; a world of walking on minefields, and where laughter can only be found in photos and deep down in people’s hearts;
• A world of occupiers, warlords and commanders with imperialist and religious flags!
• A world-wide oppressive way of life ruling over the hundreds of millions of women; beaten in the corners of their homes, killed in the stoning squares (i.e. town plazas where people are brought for punishment), raped in the dark and prostituted in red-light districts; a world of beautiful sisters trapped under burkhas and chadors and hijabs; a world where lesbians, gays and transsexuals are degraded everywhere; a world of patriarchal supremacy, of rapists and sexists!
• A world where supremacists, racists, chauvinists and fascists dominate other nations, ethnicities, languages and cultures; a world where the preferred beliefs of religions and sects are imposed on others; a world where more money is spent on Guantánamo and Pul-e-Charkhi (i.e. the Guantánamo of Afghanistan) than on hospitals, libraries and movie theaters!
• A world where the sounds of takfir² and religiosity of the mosques, churches, monasteries and temples are louder than the joyful songs of musical instruments, singers and artists; a world that is waging jihad.³
• A world that is waging jihad to destroy the environment and does not care nor will it stop until all the land, villages, seas, plains and tulips are destroyed!

This is the world of capitalism divided into exploiting and exploited classes, the world of imperialism and Islamism!*

What does the JKNA want?

The JKNA (The Movement of the New Communism of Afghanistan/NCMA) is our small but determined group. It is an organization of revolutionary communists standing shoulder to shoulder to raise our voices against all the sufferings and destruction; and shout that we cannot tolerate such a world! We dream of a completely different world: “a world where the flourishing of every individual is the condition for the flourishing of all”; a world in which every human being lends a hand to other human beings, and differences amongst the people’s ideas and desires are not excuses for discrimination, bloodshed and oppression but an expression of beauty, diversity and coexistence. The world that needs more than ever the “Communist Revolution and Nothing Less”!

Building such a society and world is not just our dream. It is more achievable, possible and real than ever before in human history. This is a scientific and provable fact. Communism is the scientific knowledge, method and approach that can understand the world and human society. It can show the functioning and metabolism of this [international proletarian] class that capitalist society has given humanity to create the possibility and potential for a different and a better society, from the ashes of this horrible and oppressive world-class capitalist society.

The science of communism (Marxism) shows us that all the wealth, knowledge, civilization and all the things that humans need for life, are produced and brought about by the eight and a half billion inhabitants of our planet collectively and socially. But within the framework of class society, society and the world are organized in such a way that less than one percent of human beings—the capitalists, big landowners and governments that support their interests—seize the wealth that has been produced to exploit, oppress, and impose their discrimination and repression on the rest of the peoples of the world.

This fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, the contradiction of “social production and private appropriation,” has consequently led to discrimination, exploitation, crises and wars in human society. And today, the earth itself is facing the danger of extinction. Where in the world have capitalist governments been able to reform these systems? They have not because they cannot. These are the inherent contradictions and internal dynamics of the capitalist system. This system is inherently inhumane and in crisis.

But Marx and Marxism showed that this capitalist system, at the same time as it creates poverty, war and misery for the majority of the world’s people, it also brings into being the basis and possibility of establishing a new social-production system: communist society and socialist society (which is society in transition to communism worldwide). Marxism has scientifically shown that this is not a spontaneous, 100% percent inevitable outcome, but a real possibility, a potential outcome in history and society. Yet it is necessary to activate the human element.

To bring about this possibility and pass from the old world to the new world requires a communist revolution: a political revolution that, with the rise of the proletariat led by its vanguard communist party, paves the way for macro and fundamental economic, social and cultural changes. This revolution requires the presence, activity and efforts of the conscious masses of the people. It is vital that through scientific means and the political and ideological line of communism, to identify obstacles, contradictions, and problems in order to find a way to solve them.

The masses of the people need the science of communism and the strategy of the communist revolution and the program of a new communist party in order to destroy the old world and move in the direction of building a new world. We have formed a core group of revolutionary communists around the JKNA/NCMA. We are in the process of building a party to carry out a revolution in Afghanistan with an understanding of the concrete political geography of the country. Let us move forward!

Phony Communism and the New Communist Movement

The word “communism” in Afghanistan needs to be rescued and revived. It has been 43 years since a group of bureaucratic capitalists affiliated with Russian imperialism first carried out the coup d’état of May 27, 1978. Then with the help of the Soviet occupying army in 1979, the remnants of the semi-colonial, semi-feudal government under the protection of Western imperialism-capitalism, the governments of Zahir Shah and Davood [Khan] were overthrown and a semi-feudal, semi-colonial government under the protection of the Soviet imperial capitalist system called the “People’s Democratic Party” of Afghanistan [PDPA] was brought in. The PDPA was in power for a decade and a half in Afghanistan.

That government was neither democratic nor representative of the interests of the people of Afghanistan, because it had the same class structure, this semi-feudal, semi-colonial capitalist system did not essentially address the problems of the class composition of Afghan society. The People’s Party initially tried to make some reforms to land ownership and the status of women, but eventually compromised with the same feudal and tribal class structure. They had four constraints that they could not eradicate from Afghan society: 1) the existence of feudalism in the agricultural economy; 2) the dependence on imperialism in the macroeconomic sphere; 3) the feudal and religious patriarchal relations, especially in the countryside [i.e. oppression of women]; and 4) the perpetuation of national [ethnic] oppression of minorities [e.g. the minority Hazara people].

From 1956-1991

The Soviet Union was the first socialist state in the world with the October Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of Lenin, which until the mid-1950s, despite all its shortcomings and mistakes, was a state of the proletariat’s dictatorship and a socialist society. But the capitalists and revisionists usurped control of the Soviet Communist Party from 1956 onwards, and turned their backs on socialism altogether, first transforming it into a state-capitalist country, and then into another imperialist power. That is why in the new communist movement of the 1960s, the Soviets were called “social-imperialist” (socialist in name and imperialist in reality).

From the mid-1960s, it was a socialist China led by comrade Mao Zedong who stood up to Russian revisionism and phony communism and raised the banner of revolution. Comrade Mao, while developing the science of Marxism-Leninism in various philosophical, economic and political spheres, broke with some of the mistakes of the Soviet socialist experience, especially the mistakes by Stalin. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 in China, led by Mao, was the highest pinnacle and most brilliant milestone that the international communist movement had reached.

The achievements of this revolution spread the voice of socialism and revolution to all parts of the world, including Afghanistan, and armed a new generation of revolutionaries against Russian revisionism. The Maoist movement in Afghanistan was founded by comrades such as Ustad Akram Yari. It stood up against phony Russian communism. But unfortunately with the developments of the late 1970s, the Thor coup and the internal wars in Afghanistan took place in one of the worst and most turbulent periods in the life of the new communist movement.

Socialism in China was defeated after Mao’s death in 1976 with a political coup, followed by intra-party neo-revisionism that came to power through repression against Mao’s true followers. Like the Soviet Union, China in a declining process, first became an authoritarian state-capitalist country, and then a reactionary imperialist power. This defeat and retreat shifted the balance of world powers to the detriment of the proletariat and to the benefit of the two imperialist blocs of the West and the East. It also caused ideological and political confusion in the new communist movement, and political and ideological retreat took place in many emerging Maoist parties and organizations all over the world. In Afghanistan, for example, the young and inexperienced Maoist movement, due to the repression and assassination of its leaders by the ruling powers led by “Parcham” and “Khalgh,” and to political and ideological flaws, took eclectic positions which are very much imbued with nationalism and populist and pragmatic views. Thus they failed to seize opportunities in the civil war against the Soviet occupation, and were unable to open up the third front against the Islamic fundamentalist reactionaries and Russian imperialism.

Long Live the New Communism

The first wave of communist revolutions and socialist governments, which began in 1871 with the Paris Commune, stabilized with the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1956, culminated in socialist China, and then its subsequent defeat. With the revival of capitalism in China, there was ideological and intellectual confusion in the international communist movement. There was a horrible liquidationism, pacifism, backwardness or right-wing extremism that we witnessed. U.S.-led global imperialist capitalism has added to their garrison, propaganda industry and lies against communism and its historical and global achievements, particularly since the 1990s, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and phony Russian socialism. We are now witnessing the results of four decades of continuous attacks by the global right-wing propaganda and ideological artilleries against communism, socialism and revolution.

But in the early 1980s, a very important historical and valuable event took place that impacted the international communist movement that had been weakened, wandering and falling apart. The flag of revolution and world communism was hoisted by comrade Bob Avakian (BA), Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP). Thus, while defending the achievements of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism in a time of liquidation, doubt, and lack of commitments, BA undertook a scientific and critical summation of the experience of communist revolutions and socialist states from the Paris Commune to socialist China. And finally, in a grand process of 40+ years of intellectual and political work, the science of communism (Marxism) entered a new era/stage with the “new synthesis of communism.”

We say that this is a new synthesis of communism, because comrade Avakian, in his critical study of Marxist theory and practice, realized that the scientific body of Marxism that was founded by Marx and Engels, and as it was developed by Lenin and Mao Zedong, is correct and scientific, at the same time, within this largely true scientific body of knowledge, there are wrong and unscientific elements that are at odds with this whole body of knowledge (i.e. the science of communism in the whole theory and practice of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao). These wrong and unscientific elements influenced the practice of communists and communist leaders, especially in Stalin, that resulted in mistakes that led to the loss of revolutionary opportunities.

Comrade Avakian discovered and broke with this historical contradiction in the body of the Marxist method and approach, and set about re-shaping the concepts and categories of the science of communism. He therefore was able to take a more scientific, correct, and comprehensive approach to formulate the strategy for the revolution in the USA (with universally applicable dimensions) and for building a new socialist society.

As BA wrote in his 2021 New Year’s Statement:

Unlike those who slander and condemn, or simply ignore, communism and the historical experience of the communist movement, I myself have done, and have led others in doing, extensive, serious scientific, study—investigation and analysis—of the history of the communist movement and the socialist societies it has brought into being.... This scientific approach has led to the conclusion that with the actual socialist societies that have been brought into being, with the leadership of communists, first in the Soviet Union and then in China ... this experience of socialism has been mainly—and in the case of China overwhelmingly—positive, while secondarily there have also been significant, in some cases serious or even grievous, errors... Drawing from this historical experience of the communist movement and a broad range of human endeavor, the new communism, as its defining method and approach, emphasizes the critical importance of science and applying the scientific method to everything—to society as well as nature.... Refusing to apply, and acting in opposition to, an honest, scientific approach to communism, the actual history of the communist movement, and the development of the new communism contributes to closing off the only real alternative to this truly monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism—the only viable alternative that represents the fundamental interests and a future worth living for the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole.⁴

Marxism was demarcated from revisionism with the formulation of Marxism as a science by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as they distinguished “scientific socialism” from the utopian socialists of their time. The same was true for Leninism in the 1920s and for Maoism from the 1960s onwards. Today, the new synthesis of communism is objectively the indicator and embodiment of the most advanced level of Marxism. With the advent of the new synthesis of communism, the former Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was also divided into two parts: part of it became a residue of the past, and part of it progressed with the new communism and joined with the ranks of the vanguard of the future. By taking up the new communism, JKNA/NCMA is trying to form and establish a party with the orientation of the new communism in the Afghanistan movement.

JKNA has come to criticize its [past] line and ideological shortcomings with the scientific approach and method of the new communism. The former Maoist movements in Afghanistan, which we were part of, should pay attention and break away from all of that. JKNA is not afraid to reject and declare erroneous the nationalist, populist, pragmatic elements including that of “the end justifies the means,” and other errors and misconceptions we were afflicted with. There were political and intellectual errors in the Maoist movement in Afghanistan that in many places resulted in even the best of the forces of the Afghan movement taking very, very wrong positions.

JKNA knows that “No revolution is possible without revolutionary theory” and the theory and science of the new communism is the key to understanding and changing the world. No arrangement, no organization, no willpower or force can change the world without scientifically recognizing the real contradictions of society and the world. Because of this, reading, learning and teaching the science of Marxism is required to make a revolution, and holding to this is the constant duty of every communist.

Two Rotten Outmodeds—Imperialism and Islamism**

Up to this point in this article, we have referred to pages from the contemporary history of Afghanistan. The occupation of Afghanistan by the Russian military, and in the situation after the defeat of socialism in China, created room for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist parties in Afghanistan. The rise of the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist movement throughout the region was further strengthened when the Islamic Republic of Iran came to power after the defeat of the anti-Shah revolution of the Iranian people in 1979.

It was in this context that sections of the masses of people in Afghanistan turned to Islamic factions that rose from the earth like mushrooms. The U.S., British and French security agencies, the Internal Security Agency of Pakistan and the Khomeini regime in Iran trained and supplied Islamic fundamentalists as Afghan jihadist groups. Throughout the 1980s, thousands of other Islamic fundamentalists were transferred to Afghanistan by Western and Pakistani security agencies from North Africa and the Gulf and Arab countries. Afghanistan became a breeding ground for jihadist groups, and a battleground between the two outmodeds of the Soviet imperialists and what eventually became Islamic fundamentalists.

With the fall of the Russian puppet governments, the jihadist groups that had gotten fat at the table of the Western imperialists and the reactionary powers of the region fought for power, reached the presidential palace, and imposed another war on the people of the cities, provinces and districts. Islamic fundamentalist traitors and reactionaries of 15 fundamentalist jihadist parties, each of which stood at the head of a group of Islamic criminal groups, engaged in murder, looting and crime. It was in the midst of these crimes, killings and devastation that the ground was prepared for the growth and training of a new army of Islamic fundamentalists who gradually became the Taliban. With the help of Pakistan and the United States, they ruled all over Afghanistan.

Since the mid-1990s, however, U.S. and Western imperialism, which for a decade from 1978 to 1988 had been supporting and training Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan against the Soviets, faced the problem of Islamic fundamentalist aggression against their own interests and those of their affiliated regimes in the region.

They even faced them in the heart of New York City on 9/11/2001. From that moment on, it was the conflict between “the historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity, up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system” that became most prominent in the Afghan political scene. The catastrophe has been that for the last forty years, the two rotten imperialists (Soviet and American) and their mercenaries in Afghanistan (“Khalgh” and “Parcham” states, Karzai and Ghani) on the one hand, and on the other hand the Islamic fundamentalists (from Mujahideen to Taliban) have divided Afghanistan among themselves.

Sections of the people turned towards the Islamic fundamentalists out of anger and hatred for the crimes of the Eastern and Western imperialists and their affiliated governments. And on the other hand, many who came to hate the Mujahideen and Taliban came under the banner of the Soviet Union, the United States and their mercenaries. After the banner of the Soviet Union had fallen, the United States and its mercenaries went into Afghanistan.

It was after 9/11 that the U.S. military and NATO, and NATO bomber pilots invaded Afghanistan for “democracy” and the elimination of the Taliban. [Former] Jihadi commanders, leaders and other operatives now working in the Karzai and Ghani puppet governments [hypocritically] propagandized that Afghanistan should be “developed,” women should be “liberated,” “welfare, security and work” should be adjusted, and law and order should be imposed. Afghanistan and Iraq were to follow the example of U.S. imperialist “humanitarian intervention” for the “Greater Middle East.” But in the words of Marx, “everything that was solid became smoke and vanished into air.” Two decades after the failure of the Greater Middle East dream, U.S. imperialism reached an agreement with the same Taliban and left Afghanistan. U.S. imperialism has washed its hands of its ambitious project in the face of waves of contradictions of global competition with other imperialist powers like Russia and China, in the context of its awkward economic and international situation, just like Russian imperialism who was forced to leave the occupation of Afghanistan more than thirty years ago.

The reactionary contradiction between the two rotten oppressors—imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism—in the absence of progressive and revolutionary alternatives of the past forty years—has led to a situation where the energy and potential in the anger of the masses against oppression and exploitation has come under the reactionary banners of these two rotten outmodeds. As BA says, “...These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.”

The contradiction of these two outmodeds is the expression of the heightened basic contradiction of the epoch of capitalism, the contradiction of social production and private appropriation. Today, the bankruptcy of both of these outmodeds is so obvious and in the open for the world to see, through the devastated, wounded and exhausted people of Afghanistan worse than anywhere else in the world.

Our revolution in Afghanistan needs to create a polarization against the two outmoded forces in society, prevent the people from siding with either of these two, and attract them to the pole of the communist revolution. We need to channel the potential of the Afghanistan people’s opposition against the Taliban into opposition against Islamic fundamentalism, drawing a correct line of demarcation between the people and the enemy in society. In today’s situation, this must be opposition to Islamic fundamentalism itself. It is necessary for the masses of people to understand that both of these outmodeds—imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism—are the source of all the oppressions, discrimination and injustices inflicted on the people. Without changing the minds of the people for the communist revolution, without uniting the people on the path of the communist revolution, we cannot do anything. And again Afghanistan society and the people will be doomed to live under the torture and bloodshed of the capitalist system no matter what the color of their flag—whether state-capitalism of the Russians or American imperialists, or Islamic fundamentalist-capitalist governments.

In addition to opposition to Islamic fundamentalism and the religious state in Afghanistan, one of the axes of changing people’s ideas for revolution is to confront the religious way of thinking and to promote the scientific way of thinking among the people, especially the workers and toilers. Without promoting a scientific method of thinking among the people, without fighting against religious ideology and religious ethics and the religious way of thinking, we cannot transform the people for liberation and revolution.

JKNA and the Current Situation in Afghanistan

With the withdrawal of U.S. air and ground forces from Bagram to Kabul, many provinces, cities and districts are being occupied one by one by the Taliban. The Taliban, which flies the same flags of “Allah Akbar” (“god is great”) had previously claimed the lives of many people by assassinations, terrorizing individuals, murdering civilians in schools, universities, hospitals, roadways and maternity wards of hospitals, has declared that they will not back down from their bloody nature of Islamic fundamentalist ideology. So the people of Afghanistan are once again face to face with the nightmare of the Taliban. As happened over the last forty years, some sections of the people have turned their hearts to the Islamic fundamentalists, and some are in grief over the departure of the imperialist forces. Again, the two rotten (outmoded) systems of Islamic fundamentalism and imperialism have divided the people. But again, the fact of the matter is that siding with either side of these two outmodeds will strengthen the other. The forty years of experience of contemporary Afghanistan is a witness to this very bitter reality.

Our response, the revolutionary communists in the core of JKNA/NCMA, to all the people of Afghanistan, the men and women who were left to suffer under the torture and fire of the Taliban, the Mujahideen, Ghani, Karzai, the United States and Russia is this: Let us put an end to:

• forty years of tragedy, bloodshed and misery in Afghanistan;
• forty years of the rule of the regimes affiliated with Russian and American imperialism and the reactionary mullahs of the Taliban and the jihadists and their functionaries;
• forty years of conspiracy by the mercenaries of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China; to forty years of opportunism of thieves and looters.

There has been no escape from the capitalist mode of production or from the two outmoded imperialists and Islamic fundamentalists, who have created nothing but catastrophe and the escalation of catastrophe. The situation has gotten worse every day for the last forty years and it will get worse yet again. The capitalist system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown.

What we see today is chaos and incoherence in Afghanistan, this decentralized and unstable situation, and at the same time the unification of global and regional rivalries, this intensification of the contradiction between imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, these are all miniature replicas of the complex contradictions in the world. This fragmentation and divergence is one of the unique features of this era.

In his recent statements, comrade Avakian has described and analyzed this process well and considers it as the result of the workings of the capitalist system at the global level and the driving forces of this system and its dynamics, especially the contradiction of anarchy and organization. But comrade Avakian and his method of scientific and enlightening analysis shows how, in the context of this global crisis, in the midst of this confusion and incoherence that pervades the entire body of the world capitalist system, there is the opportunity to create a new path, a path leading to communist revolution. The bankruptcy of all tried and tested alternatives is more obvious than ever before.

Towards the Communist Revolution and Nothing Less

Our message to Afghan men and women, to Afghan workers, toilers, intellectuals and progressives, from a group of communist supporters of the new communism in Afghanistan is this: Strengthen the fight against and go beyond the forty-year-old ruins quantitatively and qualitatively. We need organization based on the correct line. In the ranks of this nucleus of the JKNA/NCMA, this spark of a determined organization; we need you, the masses, more than anything else:

• You who hate the Taliban, ISIS and the Mujahideen;
• You who hate the forty years of U.S. and Russian imperialism and their regional mercenaries;
• You who hate all forms of oppression, discrimination and exploitation;
• You who have not yet given in or bowed down to the destruction and ugliness of this world.

Your place is within the ranks of this initial nucleus. The door is open for you to join in and build your party for the Communist Revolution and Nothing Less! For Afghanistan and move on to conquer the future!

Long live the communist revolution with the new communism!

JKNA/NCMA. Assad/August 2021

 

* ** End note: The term Islamism is the literal translation from the original statement. From what we understand, this refers to Islamic fundamentalist movements, or what some call “political Islam.” From here on, we will be using the term “Islamic fundamentalism” for wider accessibility.  [back to *] [back to **]

 

1. JKNA: J = Jounbesh or Movement, K = Kmonisty or Communist, N = Nouvin or New, A = Afghanistan  [back]

2. Excommunication of non-believers or believers in other religions.  [back]

3. A “holy war”  [back]

4. This is excerpted from section 6 of the New Year's statement from Bob Avakian, which is available online at revcom.us.  [back]