Afghanistan defeated imperialism?

Let's get something clear about the success of the Taliban - as though it is achieving some kind of heroic anti-imperialism in Afghanistan. Sadly, some left currents in the UK are lining up with Trump/Biden (for different reasons) on the withdrawal of the retreat of the US (and UK and German forces.) These left groups are offering a (very doubtful) 'hurrah' about the end of imperialism in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the US Presidents were both determined to stop another $2.26 trillion (Brown University Cost of War). They both added the costs in injury and death involved. (There were 2312 US deaths, compared with 69,000 Afghan security and 51,000 Afghan civilians from 2002 to now - again analysed by Brown University.) The US figures provided the front cover at least for the US's more sentimental losses for the American voters. Biden now does not think so much of his would be Afghan comrades and avoids their 98% losses. 

More facts have arisen regarding the Taliban, now mooching round the streets of Kabul and the other 33 provinces, often carrying out exactly what is denied on the media by their leader Abdul Ghani Barada. The nine day 'battle' to win the 34 provinces overwhelmingly amounted to a huge, well trained and long expected kleptocracy. The provincial 'leaders' of the provinces were either living off the $2.26 trillion, spread out from the ex President's Ashraf Ghani's largess, or from the financial bypasses provided by Trump's 'deal' in Doha, who wanted the US money to go over the heads of the money-grabbing government in favour of the money-grubbing war lords. 

Despite the $2.26 trillion since 2002, Afghanistan's poverty line is below 54.5% of the population. Afghanistan is one of the least developed countries in the world. On the 2018 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Afghanistan ranked 172 out of 180 countries. Al Jazeera put it this way. ' Some are that poor management of the countries wealth, coupled with armed groups and local strongmen (to) illegally extract resources and sell them on the black market to neighbouring countries and beyond.' 'The Taliban earn between $2.5m and $10m a year from mining talc alone, which has become, next to opium, their main source of revenue.' Mining is the future of Afghanistan's development according to local experts. But the effective pact between the local war lords/Taliban and US funds, the country has been bought. In that sense the Taliban have simply pushed its power of what was the board of Afghanistan/USA. There was, and now is, no revolution for a real Afghanistan's development. The Taliban, from that perspective, is yet but another bandit that has stolen the country. It is a form of domination that acts as an imperialism. And in a more violent, and more backward way than before except that they live in the same country - sometimes. 

US imperialism has set up both its own failure in Afghanistan and the creation of another regime that is worse. Fundamentally, it is a further decline of US imperialism, but it is completely false to imagine that some advance has occurred for the Afghanistan people. What they have is more difficult and more dangerous. 

Today (18 August) at least two people have been killed after gunmen fired into into a crowd who had taken down a Taliban flag in the city of Jalalabad. There are now further eruptions. ' Reporting from Kabul, Al Jazeera said that the protests have expanded beyond Jalalabad to several other provinces.  

Afghanistan and the West

Trump floated 'a deal' with the Taliban, over the heads of his US installed government, to agree that there would be no more attacks on the West and then the Taliban would be able to share the government. Biden did not believe in the Taliban's offers (despite, for example, that they have said on the 10th of August that the West would not become a base for terrorists) but Biden did believe that the US trained Afghan army would hold the line against the Taliban - which would be enough to keep the West safe, (despite a likely endless fight in Afghanistan itself.)

These two military talents are only topped in history by the Brits, who lost three wars in Afghanistan, the latter providing a day of celebration in Afghanistan on the 19th of August. Any guesses about the date of the 'fall' of Kabul?

Afghanistan's current government is finished. But serious results will erupt as the factional lines, in and around the Taliban, break out across the country. One major probability is the renovation of al-Qaeda across the Pakistani/Afghanistan border, coupled with the prevailing pressure by China on both parts and on the Pakistan military. 

The result of the US forces' retreat (coupled by the exit of the mini UK) and the apparent 'success' of the Taliban, is a disaster for the Afghanistan people, particularly for women and children. This is a barbarism as awful as described by Rosa Luxemburg in WW1 and her judgement of the counter revolution arising in Germany. 'Socialism or barbarism' was her perception. 

Many in the US couple this moment with the 'terrible failure' of the exit of US forces out of Vietnam. But they reversed their judgement then and now. Vietnam was an historic success in South East Asia - and fired the optimism of millions across the world for a different life. Afghanistan today is the opposite. The turn to the dark-ages is certainly a modern aspect of a spreading shaky international capitalist system and an increasing decline of the Western imperialist adventures, but it is a turn to barbarism. The US (and the UK) as a result of their own weaknesses, have just turned forty million into a deeper hell. 

Does that mean that the West's invasion, (following the USA build up of the Taliban, organised and funded to defeat the Soviet Union's invasion) was, or is, right? Of course not. But it would be absurd to follow a 'what's if' trail to simply apply Afghanistan independence. That would need to be going back at least to the Victorian 'heroes' and their gatling guns. 

It has to start with an Afghanistan (nominally created as a nation by the UK) that was and remains an area of enormous value and importance. As China has advanced, so Afghanistan even now demonstrates its centrality in the movements between East and West that constantly created huge distributions between the rising settlements and populations, from the Mediterranean to the China seas. Imperialism; the British imperialists, blocked that flow in the 19th century. They wanted a frozen India/Pakistan and the isolation of Russia and China. A blocked Asia laid out north and south and run by London. So, history does turn, but only starting in the present.

What, as somebody once said, should be done? 

There is more than a core of Afghan people that will not give away their expectations into the violent hands of the dark ages. The imperialists have failed them. But there are others that are now able to at least support a new battle for a proper, independent life. China, because it has to function on globalisation and it  is scared of religious cults, will tentatively and at some distance support (but not imperialise) a serious movement, starting with Kabul (alien to the Taliban and entirely based on force) which can build an organisation that will win back the cities. In due course non-military international brigades can provide aid delivered by Afghanistan people that was so deeply unwilling in the hands of the UK, the USSR and the US. The Taliban undoubtedly lead a significant portion of Afghanistan, but less, much less than 2000. History, even for the Taliban, does not stop.   

Capitalism dying?

Lots of correspondents, mainly from the left, are writing about the post-Covid type of capitalism. US President Biden's apparent renovation of his own version of the 'New-Deal' is propelling the argument for a type of Keynesianism in most of the western world. The prior, von-Hayek model, which reduced State expenditure, sought low taxes, free trade and trickle down benefits, appears to have failed - even among the cautious EU. We know that Reagan and Thatcher set up the political shape required to energise Hayek's economic ideas. But now economists, including Eliot, the newspaper Guardian economic correspondent, are praising the return of Keynes, despite the continuing traditional political shape of Reagan and Thatcher, which has been maintained. State money is distributed, sure. But the Reagan/Thatcher attack-laws on labour rights, remains a vengeance. 

Half-baked Keynesianism actually started not with Covid but with the 2008 collapse of the banks. The banks fell and their rescuing was a very particular State-like shift away from Hayek (but not at all towards Keynesianism).  It started with the huge quantitative easing from States to banks and then from banks to the stock exchanges and then from stock exchanges to shares of companies and then from shares to the super wealthy. Hayek's trickle down benefits and the increase of profits then became no sorts of benefits at all, trickle or otherwise, just simply austerity. This was literally capitalism-as-social-theft. In previous blogs we have noted the decline and indeed the destruction of social democracy in the West - the political sign of capitalism-as-social-theft in the West. 

Has Biden (or for that matter UK's Prime Minister Johnson) pushed history back? Is the old Keynesianism really emerging ? Sorry, no. It is true that social and political turmoil is rising, including in the West. It is true that Biden has distributed large, individual, increases of wages and some parts of welfare. (Boris peels off here.) It is also true that he wants to increase taxes, particularly corporation taxes, to renovate the USA's infrastructure and to broaden the development of green jobs and industry. But the conditions for Keynes no longer apply. How is this? It is the fact that the waves of capitalism are not constant. They do not repeat their patterns or combinations, anymore than the evolution of humanity repeats its lives. Are there discernible patterns and cycles in capitalism? Yes; patterns and cycles are understandable, similar and pliable, but because they are always moving they are never exactly the same.  

The content of Biden's plan has little to do with the terms and conditions of Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt saw the rise of fascism as little worse than his views about the danger of the UK's empire. (At one point in WW2 at a separate meeting with Stalin, he suggested that India should be like the Soviet Union and break away from the British Empire to allow modern development.) Roosevelt's State wealth distribution could dominate the great US corporations, their taxes handed over, as the price to control risings and to prevent the grip of communism in the US. 

Biden has no such context. (And Johnson is another joke entirely when he denies the continuation of austerity to his UK electorate.) The great corporations, nominally in the US, that Biden requires for the use of his State taxes, are not of the like of the 1930s of Ford or Bessemer Steel. They are located in the global sphere. Equally, there is no 'communist threat' forcing US corporations to accept their tax payments in order to defend capitalism against the workforce of the US. The workforce of the US are barely beginning to organise. Instead it is 'communist China' that is the threat for the new corporations that are based globally. In reality the 'threat' that Biden is trying to use on the corporations in the US is the 'threat' of Trump-based fascism. A step that would rapidly place China as the leading economic country in the world. Alas, as history suggests, big capital has had a rather respectful response when it came to associating with fascism.   

More broadly, among the studies of modern capitalism (see for example the New Left Review piece by Cedric Durand - 'Forces of Change') the impending contradictions of both the Hayek and Keynes capitalisms suggests the need for an entirely new cycle. A cycle that requires a particular, new character, one of building drastic social and political interventions. Why? In order to continue the sovereignty of the economics of capitalism, so far dominated by us and by our five-hundred year capitalist system. Because ... capitalism's recent dynamics are breaking down. 

It is necessary to avoid any foolish assumptions that capitalism will destroy itself, a view that many times has been shouted out from childish versions of Marx or Lenin etc. So far the capitalist drive has recovered and reorganised all its crises. But it is equally blind to imagine that previous capitalisms will simply repeat themselves. More; the contradictions and social stresses of capitalism become more heinous in ever mounting stages. In such situations, catastrophes make the capitalist system less and less bearable for the overwhelming majority of the people of the world. It is arguable that we are at just such a terrifying moment today. And the consequences become more and more barbarous.

To pick up the new context of capitalism's next circle (or circles) a set of observations should be offered.

1. Note the sets of analyses regarding the mechanisms of capitalism, largely independent of social and political interaction, on the assumption that the economy of capitalism is the core of society. The greatest such model was the amazing books and essays of Ernest Mandel. 

2. The 'self destruction of capitalism' idea is simply empty in all of its history.

3. But today we note that the crisis of capitalism becomes both intensely more problematic - AND  - intensely more tangled, with the rising social crises so common in modern times. It would be absurd not to coalesce, not to see the combinations, of what is often only described as an economic engine. The modern economic engine, now itself reorganised by effects of the world wars, is partly reordering new societies and vice versa. The analyses of modern capitalism does not proceed from a capital A then to a small b and then to c.    

4. And the wider and wider mystification applied to modern capitalism has never been a more developed complexity. (This of course is part of the means designed to deny the implications of a system that exploits the overwhelming majority in the world.)

5. While capitalism in itself becomes more and more difficult, crises ridden and dangerous - the combination of the increasing social crises together with capitalism creates the more and more likelihood of human extinction. (As WW1 and WW2 hint.)

6. Capitalism has to move onwards to sustain its role in society, through competition, mergers, acquisitions, monopolies, technology and most of all labour, to create its object of wealth. 

7. Logically, globalisation can only be the ultimate end for any further extension of capitalism.

8. But as globalisation is reaching its peak across the planet, it becomes weaker and weaker as a force, first because of the failures of imperialism across the globe and second because it has stalled away from the key mechanisms spelled out above. 

9. This capitalism failing at its own height is most obviously apparent in the herding of wealth for personal purposes among more and more millionaires (who rarely trickle down.) Virile Capital, albeit viciously and violently, built social and technical revolutions in the past. This aspect of modern capitalism has become less and less.  

10. Less apparent but more decisive is the failure of capitalism, more and more, in relation to the world's danger. 

The capitalist system accepted and partly swallowed two world wars. The system and its corporations  were used to defend the results including a nuclear bomb. Today capitalism is unable to solve or resolve any of the planet's main dangers; heat, nuclear battles or any sense of billions of people that they have a chance of sure progress. Today, vast resources in slowly moving ships and concentrated internet deals about wealth at light speed, are constantly bought and sold, borrowed and paid. The novelty of this endless, world above the world, is its gradual, but relentless, detachment from the world. The US holds Japan and China's debts. Both countries hold wealth equivalently more than their debts. Both countries use their US debts to pressurise sales from their countries to the US. Now Biden, and Trump before, were and are closing down China's sales. They have to. China is getting richer than the US. US capitalism, already based on money and not production, now needs to make its own products. The aim is to force decline in China. And so it rolls on. 

Consider. The state capitalism of China alone is now overwhelmingly the single social advance in the last two decades. The main motor of the world's general world capitalism, capitalism led by the US, is declining at a pace. Capitalism in the West is now necessarily required to halter and diminish social welfare, political democracy and any substantial reform of the working class. Living standards are also declining. The planet is in ecological danger. Wealth is more and more concentrated and unavailable for reform within the system. Technology offers a narrow development and reflects the smallest achievements in centuries. The remains of democracy are reducing and nukes are expanding. The capitalist system no longer advances. Worse; it prepares for degeneration and social destruction.

Posted by Brian Heron at 16:48