[The following resolution was supported by a minority of the United Secretariat.]
1. The first task of revolutionary Marxists in regard to the events that are unfolding in Afghanistan is to denounce the hypocrisy of the reactionary imperialist propaganda campaign, which is using the pretext of the Soviet troop intervention in Kabul to call for a struggle against "atheistic communism," "Soviet imperialism," and other scarecrows constantly brandished by the world bourgeoisie. In particular, revolutionary Marxists must warn the workers of all countries, and especially those in the imperialist countries, of the real objective of this propaganda campaign. Its aim is nothing other than to prepare the conditions for new imperialist aggressions against popular struggles.
2. Nonetheless, the fact remains that countering the imperialist propaganda should not take the place, in and of itself, of a political position. While revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the Soviet Union against imperialism, they are not at all obliged to defend every action undertaken by the Soviet bureaucracy, be they progressive or anti-imperialist in their stated motivations. In the case of Afghanistan, the workers movement is confronted with one of the thorniest problems of the class struggle, that of the right of nations to self-determination. It is useful to recall the position of the Bolsheviks on this subject. Lenin led long battles on this question, including in 1919 when he polemicized against those who wanted to restrict the nations' right to self-determination, using the nature of their leadership as a criterion, to the point of granting the right only to nations run by their workers.
We cannot deny [the right of self-determination| to a single one of the peoples living within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire. What, then, can we do in relation to such peoples as the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, who to this day are under the influence of their mullahs? ... Can we approach these peoples and tell them that we shall overthrow their exploiters? We cannot do this, because they are entirely subordinated to their mullahs. In such cases we have to wait until the given nation develops, until the differentiation of the proletariat from the bourgeois elements, which is inevitable, has taken place. ...
Now Scheidemann's party is already saying that we want to conquer Germany. That is of course ridiculous, nonsensical. But the bourgeoi- Bie have their own interests and their own press, which is shouting this to the whole world in hundreds of millions of copies; Wilson, too, is supporting this in his own interests. The Bolsheviks, they declare, have a large army, and they want, by means of conquest, to implant their Bolshevism in Germany.... We must arrange things so that the German traitorsocialists will not be able to say that the Bolsheviks are trying to impose their universal system, which, as it were, can be brought into Berlin on Red Army bayonets. And this is what may happen if the principle of the self-determination of nations is denied...
Communism cannot be imposed by force.... (Lenin, "Report on the Party Program," pregented to the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, March 19, 1919).
However, the position of revolutionary Marxists has never been to raise the democratic principle of the right of nations to self-determination into an absolute principle. This right remains dependent upon the class-struggle interests of the world proletariat. It can be legitimately, but temporarily, bypassed in the case where a workers state is forced to act out of consideration of self-defense. Nevertheless, and even in such a case, it is necessary to act with the greatest caution. It is in light of these premises that we must examine the Afghanistan affair.
3. Without a doubt, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is being carried out in gross violation of the right of peoples to self-determination. It is, in fact, well known that the Soviet troops themselves
overthrew Amin in order to replace him by Karmal, who they brought from exile with them. It is also a well-known fact that there is no qualitative difference between the regimes of Taraki, Amin, and Karmal, each of which has been supported in turn by the Kremlin. The recent release of prisoners by the Karmal regime does not constitute evidence to the contrary. Moreover, it did not succeed in winning popular sympathy for Karmal, since the fact of his having been imposed from the outside has alienated him from the Afghan people. On the other hand, the imperialist support to the Afghan "mujahedeen" led by feudalreligious reactionaries, has never reached proportions comparable to that of the Soviet support to Kabul, even before the direct intervention of the Kremlin's troops. Imperialism's support to the Afghan rebels never attained the dimensions of outside intervention that would have justified the intervention of Soviet troops, despite the claims of the Kremlin leaders.
If indeed, however, the Kabul regime were really threatened with being overthrown by the "mujahedeen," the only correct way to prevent such an outcome would have been to urge the regime to abandon its methods of military dictatorship and to seek to base itself on a mobilization of the masses around their own interests while promoting their independent organization into Soviets. Such a policy would be, as we know, the opposite of that being followed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose aim is to generalize their own methods. To state that a seizure of power in Kabul by reactionaries would have constituted a serious threat to the security of the Soviet Union is, moreover, totally ridiculous.
4. Condemning the intervention of Soviet troops in Afghanistan does not resolve, however, the problem of what attitude to adopt toward these troops. It is in fact possible to hold the position that in light of this "fait accompli," to demand the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops would be in the interests of the reactionaries and of imperialism. We, for our part, maintain just the opposite.
A prolonged presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan can only fuel the following tendencies:
a. The tendency that the Afghan rebellion will increase in strength and popularity, profiting from the national Afghan resentment against Soviet intervention and from imperialist support using this intervention as a pretext. The Kremlin is in the process of getting bogged down in a war that it can never complete, inasmuch as it is completely illusory to try to wipe out guerrilla forces in a mountainous coun try when they have in addition two bases of support at their disposal-Pakistan and Iran. The logic of such a "counterinsurgency" operation is permanent enlargement of the combat zone and incursion into the territories serving as bases of support for the guerrillas.
b. The reactionary, anticommunist tendency of the Islamic movement throughout the Muslim world. Reactionaries in the
BABRAK KARMAL
Muslim countries have today seized upon the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to orchestrate an uproar against "atheistic communism," which is presented as the kind of regime the Soviet Union wants to impose by force on the Muslim peoples. Washington and its allies are counting on the Afghanistan affair to reverse the dominant anti-Western orientation imprinted on the Islamic movement by the affair of the American hostages in Tehran. In addition, the campaign can have repercussions inside the Soviet Union itself, where bureaucratic oppression of the nationalities creates ideal conditions for this.
c. The imperialists' justification for their resumption of the arms race, under the pretext that the Soviet Union is demonstrating in Afghanistan that it intends to use force to impose regimes loyal to it. The Afghanistan affair has already made a shambles of the efforts of the workers movement in the imperialist countries against the step-up of the nuclear arsenal in Europe and the West. It has helped dissipate the paralysing effects of the Vietnam War on the capacities of American imperialism to carry out foreign military intervention. It has also helped disorient the antibureaucratic opposition in the workers states.
5. In this context, it is imperative that the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan immediately and that the Kremlin recognize the right of self-determination for the people of this country, thus repairing the wrong caused by its intervention into the permanent revolution in Afghanistan and in the entire region. The possibility of the Muslim rebels taking power in Kabul-which is in no way inevitable-is, on the whole, much less harmful to world revolution than a prolonged war by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Revolutionary Marxists must take part in and promote actions by the antiimperialist and workers movement to press the Soviet Union to immediately withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. In doing this, they must oppose all characterization of the Soviet Union as imperialist. They must also fulfill their duty of solidarity with the antifeudal and anti-imperialist Afghan forces, explaining that the demand for the withdrawal of Soviet troops should in no way be confused with support to the "mujahedeen." Revolutionary Marxists will in this way have the opportunity to explain the difference between their conception of socialism and that of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Corrections
The special supplement of Intercontinental Press/Inprecor containing documents of the 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International inadvertently omitted the vote totals on two of the Indochina Resolutions. Only an indicative vote of delegates and fraternal observers was taken on this agenda point.
The document "The Sino-Indochinese Crisis" on page 184 was submitted by a majority of the United Secretariat and the vote was: 56.5 for, 42.5 against, 11 abstentions, and 3 not voting. The document "Advances in Indochinese Revolution and Imperialism's Response" on page 194 was submitted by a minority of the United Secretariat and the vote was: 30.5 for, 72 against, 7.5 abstentions, and 3 not voting.
William Gottleib asks that we note the following correction to his article, "World Revolution, War Spending Send Gold Soaring," in the February 4 issue. The sentence, on page 91, "Writing about the relationship between hard currency and paper money in Capital, Marx explained:" should have read,
"Writing about the relationship between hard cash (gold) and other commodities in Capital, Marx explained:"
In Ernest Mandel's article, "Behind the Soaring Price of Gold" in the February 11 issue, the term "price of production" was incorrectly translated as "cost of production" toward the top of the middle column of page 123.