I recently happened to read a piece from March, Arjunveer Singh’s Beyond Revolutionary Romanticism: The Case for Strategic Socialist Transition, which I found rather disappointing. Singh lays out a program for what should be done once state power is seized, but does not actually explain how to get to that point. He does not seem to particularly care whether a socialist government is established via elections, military coup, urban insurrection, or protracted people’s war. This question, however, is of great significance. To illustrate, I will mention the example of another agrarian, backwards country which carried out a more successful revolution, China.

Following their victory over the Guomindang, the CPC did not attempt to establish a socialist society overnight. Instead, they implemented what they termed New Democracy, wherein the bourgeoisie would be suffered to exist for a period of time, in order to carry out certain tasks in the development of the country. In the cities the bourgeoisie was carefully managed, with various forms of state oversight and regulation, but private companies remained in private hands. Eventually, when it determined that retaining bourgeois ownership was no longer necessary, it was not an especially difficult thing for the CPC to nationalise the remaining private firms, and they would not re-emerge until the Deng Xiaoping era, when they were brought back for reasons quite unrelated to anything which Singh discusses. This would seem to be a complex kind of success story for Singh’s program, a gradual transition, managed by a workers’ government, but without causing too much chaos in the short term. In rural areas, on the other hand, land reform was dramatic, with many landlords outright executed, and their property naturally handed over to the peasants, though it still took the form of re-distribution, without actually doing away with private property.

Both of these approaches were made possible by the same fact, namely that the CPC had won such a definitive military victory that no force within China could meaningfully oppose them. The remaining genuine counter-revolutionaries were defeated and totally isolated from outside help. While the bourgeoisie existed, the bourgeois state had been fought and beaten. It is exactly the same with the NEP in the USSR. Such a thing could only exist after the Whites, and the foreign armies which intervened in their favour, were beaten, and the bourgeoisie had no more ability to fight. In both cases, long and arduous military campaigns preceded moderate policy.

Singh’s lack of attention to the process of revolution explains why he does not see an important difference in Afghanistan’s case. The Saur revolution was, in reality, a military coup, backed by some part of the citizens of Kabul, but few others. It relied on a small, educated elite. The CPC had spent decades organising and preparing the peasantry, the Bolsheviks had made deep inroads in the (much larger and more developed) Russian proletariat, and into the massive conscript army of the Tsar. In addition, the Russian peasantry had already begun to agitate for its own interests against the nobility, which meant that, although the Bolsheviks themselves played only a minor role, the promise of land reform was successful in bringing many of them into the revolutionary camp. The failure of the PDPA has less to do with its specific policies, and more to do with how it came to them. It was a tiny, elite party, without, as Singh mentions, a social base. Their agrarian reforms were not much more radical than those in China, but because they came as something decreed from Kabul, rather than carried out primarily by the peasants themselves, the landlords, and their allies in the clergy, were able to fight back, and even bring many peasants over to their side.

Singh actually makes the same mistake which the PDPA here, by presuming to dictate a policy from on high, rather than engaging in class struggle. He seems to think that socialism is something which is established by the state, a set of policies, rather than something which is established by the working class, making use of a proletarian state for a time. I am not opposed to tactical caution, but it must exist within an overall strategic situation which justifies it. Singh does not actually explain the strategic situation within which his approach would be applied. He describes a hypothetical socialist government in India, but nothing about how it came to be established, the military and security situation (crucial if the threat of expropriation is to mean anything), who supports it, or who opposes it. He does not imagine it having any particular social base upon coming to power, but what government can come to power without a base? If he is advocating this as a strategy for a hypothetical future military junta, along the lines of the PDPA, let him say so.

Fredrick Miller