Jeff Mackler, in his piece entitled Afghanistan: The Defeat of U.S. Imperialism and the Road Ahead, published in Socialist Action (SA), gets at least one thing right: The US needlessly surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, departing in the most humiliating and disgraceful way possible. Everything else in Mr. Mackler's article is wrong. A typical paragraph:
After 20 years and $2.6 trillion in Pentagon spending, after deploying more than 120,000 U.S. troops at the highpoint of the war – half of them U.S.-financed via Blackwater and other privatized mercenary and war crimes committing forces accountable to no one – after more than 470,000 direct and indirect civilians killed and 2,442 U.S. troops dead and another 20,666 wounded – Afghanistan, among the poorest nations on earth, is once again free of foreign invaders – a critical first victory that blasts open the imperialist-sealed door to the potential for future social progress.
Mr. Mackler attributes every war casualty in Afghanistan to the American forces. Apparently the Taliban never killed anybody. And he ignores the Afghan civil war that started before the Americans arrived and will continue with renewed brutality now that we're gone.
You can't believe Mr. Mackler's numbers. Recall he's the guy who claimed that "between 15 million and 26 million people" showed up for the George Floyd protests--a manifestly ridiculous assertion that not even his own followers believe.
The current article contains at least a few howlers, e.g.,
[Belgian King] Leopold, however, was compelled to grant American robber barons, J.P. Morgan and the Rockefeller billionaires, (today the J.P. Morgan/Chase $trillion mega conglomerate) the mining rights to that nation, rights that they retain to this day.
JP Morgan has a market cap of $470 billion--nowhere close to the trillions that Mr. Mackler claims. This number is easily checked. Further, what mining rights does JP Morgan still have? Certainly no copper mines. The cobalt mines are now owned mostly by China. Unlike me, Mr. Mackler cites no references--I think he just makes stuff up. And how did an article about Afghanistan wind up documenting King Leopold's sins from the 19th Century? This is argument by irrelevancy.
I've already opined about Afghanistan here--no need to repeat any of that. Instead, this post is about American Brezhnevism, which is the way I describe the politics of Socialist Action and its leader, Jeff Mackler.
For those too young to remember, Leonid Brezhnev (1906 - 1982) was, second to Joseph Stalin, the longest-serving general secretary of the Soviet Union, holding office from 1964 until his death. He was a renowned bureaucrat, expert in the internal politics of the Kremlin, and largely immune from any outside criticism. He led his country through the Age of Stagnation (1973 - 1982) during which the Soviet economy shrank relative to the United States (and depending on which numbers you believe, also in absolute terms).
Brezhnev suffered from ill-health beginning already in the mid-70s. By the end he was largely incapacitated, acting a puppet serving the interests of the Politburo. After a short interregnum, he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempts at reform led to the demise of the Soviet Empire.
Brezhnev's politics were pragmatic and unprincipled. He viewed the United States as a great power competitor, not as a capitalist/imperialist evil. Accordingly, he allied himself with anybody who opposed the USA, regardless of their opinions on anything else.
The modern variation on Brezhnevism is today known as campism. This is succinctly defined in Socialist Forum this way:
Campism is a longstanding tendency in the international and U.S. left. It approaches world politics from the standpoint that the main axis of conflict is between two hostile geopolitical camps: the “imperialist camp,” today made up of the United States, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Israel (or some such combination) on one hand and the “anti-imperialist camp” of Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other less-industrialized nations on the other.
Campism, like Brezhnevism, is utterly unprincipled. There are no red lines, green lines, demilitarized lines--and certainly no class lines. There is only the USA and its close allies on one side, and everybody else on the other. The truest and best exemplar of campism on the American Left is, indeed, Socialist Action, represented ably by its chief bureaucrat, Jeff Mackler. Indeed, Mr. Mackler supports all of the above listed regimes, at least vis a vis the United States.
Socialist Action has begrudgingly admitted that Russia and China are capitalist. But they still support those countries against the USA. More egregiously, they excuse the gross human rights abuses in North Korea and Iran only because the US opposes them. Mr. Mackler has been a staunch supporter of the vile Assad regime in Syria.
(As an aside, I mention that the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) also still supports the North Korean regime. Assistant Chief Honcho Steve Clark sent a letter to Pyongyang:
“We stand in solidarity with the Korean people’s struggle to reunify the country and restore Korea’s national sovereignty,” Steve Clark wrote for the Socialist Workers Party in a Sept. 9 letter to the North Korean government on the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
So regards the Norks the SWP is similarly guilty. But they're not campist because they never supported the Assad regime, and no longer support the Ayatollahs in Iran.)
What it boils down to is that Socialist Action lets Donald Trump determine their politics for them. They simply do the opposite of whatever Trump says.
So is it really any surprise that Mr. Mackler wants to lend critical support to the Taliban? No--of course it isn't.
We begin with the proposition that the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan is a victory for all humanity... In inflicting this defeat the Afghan people, regardless of the reactionary ideology and practice of the landlord capitalist Taliban leadership, exercised the right of poor and oppressed peoples and nations to self-determination, that is, to be free from imperialist domination and rule.
Despite being "reactionary," the Taliban have struck a blow for freedom and liberty worldwide. I hope Mr. Mackler can go on a speaking tour in Kabul and tell that to a crowd of schoolgirls.
He's willing to give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt.
The Taliban have issued statements indicating that they will not repeat their policies of excluding women and girls from receiving public education and from working more generally. They have indicated that the most reactionary aspects of Shariah law may be modified. No doubt all these statements and proclamations, as well as their initial dealings with the governments of world capitalism, are aimed at demonstrating a semblance of tolerance and stability following two decades of unmitigated chaos under U.S. rule.
No--I don't think it "remains to be seen." Of course the Taliban are going to enforce a strict interpretation of Shariah law. It only depends on how carefully they hide their brutality. And note how Mr. Mackler will now blame the US if the Taliban so much as lays a finger on a schoolgirl.
The other odd thing about the just-quoted paragraph is that it could've been written by Joe Biden (or at least by his ghostwriters). Jen Psaki has said much the same thing. This looks to prove my claim that Mr. Mackler is just a Democrat in thin disguise--serving a role much the same as the CPUSA did when Brezhnev was in power.
Socialist Action is a bunch of unprincipled, Brezhnevist Democrats all the way down.
Further Reading:
