American Brezhnevism Today

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:

• Book Review: Kim Jong Un
• Book Review: Gorbachev
• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade, and China

Afghanistan

My Trotskyist friends are all celebrating the defeat of American "imperialism" in Afghanistan, while at the same time lamenting the takeover by the Taliban.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) posts a piece by Roy Landersen entitled US rulers end 20-year-long imperialist war in Afghanistan. The lede:

The U.S. rulers’ 20-year war and occupation of Afghanistan, and the carnage it inflicted on working people at home and abroad, ended with further devastation as the Taliban retook the capital, Kabul, Aug. 15.

By the end, the US had 2500 troops in Afghanistan, which hardly rises to the level of "occupation." The supposed "carnage it inflicted" described in the first clause, in fact prevented the Taliban's "devastation" asserted in the second. Incoherence best describes that sentence, along with the rest of Mr. Landersen's article.

In fact, the American war in Afghanistan largely ended by 2013, after which we provided air and intelligence support to aid the Afghan army. All of this was suddenly withdrawn by President Biden without notice, as Mr. Landersen reports.

In the wake of President Joseph Biden’s April 13 announcement that all U.S. forces would withdraw by Sept. 11, and Washington’s abandonment of its main Bagram airbase without any notice to Afghan government forces, the reactionary Taliban stepped up its military offensive. The Afghan army disintegrated after the withdrawal of U.S. army and air support. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Taliban commanders announced the formation of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

Among that air support taken out of the country were all the Med-Evac helicopters used to airlift wounded Afghan soldiers to hospital. Apparently Mr. Biden expected the Afghan troops to bleed to death on the battlefield just so the US could make a graceful exit.

A better article, albeit with the contradiction already in the headline, posted by Socialist Resurgence and written by Farooq Tariq, is Afghanistan – The U.S. occupation took only human lives; Taliban victory is not a sign of peace. The lede paragraph:

It is now evident that the U.S. imperialism has lost all its human and financial investment in Afghanistan. The Taliban have almost occupied Afghanistan without a fight. What has been spent in Afghanistan in the name of development, “democracy” and training of the armed forces for the last 20 years was unprecedented in the history of the world.

Well--true, of course. The US has needlessly thrown away whatever it has built in Afghanistan, though I doubt the amount--inflation adjusted--was "unprecedented in the history of the world." 

I'm bothered by the word "financial"--I don't know what it means. I believe he thinks the US was invested in Afghanistan for potential business ventures--like Walmart was gonna open up a chain of stores in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. If this is what he suggests, it's ridiculous. Afghanistan was never going to be a trading partner for American consumers.

The reason the US was in Afghanistan was to fight Jihadi terrorist groups that used the country as a base. You may or may not agree with that reason--but that was the reason. It was not an excuse for "democracy," "imperialism," or anything else.

Mr. Tariq admits that the US was partially successful.

Although some human progress has been made: For example, the average age [i.e., life expectancy—editors] has risen from 56 to 64 years, and the number of children who die before the age of five has halved. The literacy increased from 8% to 43%; 89% have access to safe drinking water in the cities. It was only 16% before.

This is not trivial--though it's all gone now, thanks to Mr. Biden's stupidity.

Mr. Tariq claims that "[a]ccording to the Cost of War Project, the United States poured $2226 billion into Afghanistan. This money could have provided basic education and health care all over the world."

Really? Tell that to the girls of northeastern Nigeria, routinely murdered or kidnapped by Boko Haram for the crime of going to school. Or tell that to 10-year-old boys in Uganda and Congo, forced by the Lord's Resistance Army to murder their parents. For that matter, tell that to the girls in Afghanistan--now that the Taliban is in charge, where is their schooling? Absent American "imperialism" it's all gone up in smoke.

For without competent soldiers for protection, any money spent on teachers and textbooks is wasted.

The silliest response to the Afghanistan debacle is that put forth by Ezra Brain, writing for Left Voice, in an article entitled Refugee Caps Are a Tool of Imperialism. Don’t Trust Imperialists to Resolve the Refugee Crisis. The money paragraph is this:

Be it refugee bans or refugee caps, socialists must oppose all imperialist attempts to use borders to restrict the free movement of people, especially refugees from imperialist wars. To put it bluntly: the greatest imperial power in the world, with a coalition of other imperialist powers, attacked, looted, and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years and is now trying to prevent refugees from entering. After 20 years of imperialist occupation, Afghanistan is left impoverished, war torn, and with a growing COVID rate. This is imperialism in its clearest form. Every refugee from the Afghan war — indeed, every refugee anywhere — must be allowed entry into the U.S. and given full legal rights and protections.

Pretty much every word here is wrong. What has the US "looted" from Afghanistan? The country was poor long before we got there and it remains poor today, albeit as Mr. Tariq pointed out, slightly better off than it was before.

But the truly inane demand is that the US accept all refugees from Afghanistan--that would likely be half the population. Beyond the useless claque of New York City college professors that make up Left Voice, there is no political constituency in this country that wishes for this.

It is particularly weird coming from Mr. Brain, an activist in the LGBTQ... community. Suppose only 99% of the Afghans who arrive on our shores are honest refugees--the remainder are instead Jihadis. That means for every million Afghans arriving in Manhattan, 10,000 of them will be hellbent on destroying secular America. I doubt Mr. Brain will do very well when surrounded by 10,000 anti-gay, homophobic, murderous Islamist extremists.

Mr. Brain's demand is ridiculous and very unlikely to come true, but people like him really should be careful what they wish for.

Socialist Action has gotten too small to maintain a proper webpage, and they have yet to post anything about Afghanistan. Which is unfortunate because they represent the dying embers of Brezhnevism in America, and I'd like to know what a Brezhnevist thinks. I predict that, unlike Trotskyists, they'll celebrate the rise of the Taliban--this because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's the same reasoning for their support of Kim Jong Un, Nicholas Maduro, Bashir al-Assad, and even Xi Jinping.

For just like their mentor, Leonid Brezhnev, they support any government that opposes American "imperialism", no matter how vile.

Further Reading:

• Cuba Needs More Communism
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower