Re: [Marxism] Imperialist feminism in Iraq

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

These days, I find myself more and more convinced that the clean
Hegelian notion of dialectical processes is best left to abstract
philosophers. In the real world, the general rule is when you fuck
something up, it stays fucked up for a long time.

The April Revolution of 1978 in Afghanistan, led by middle-class
Marxists of the Stalinist variety who were initially more or less
independent of the USSR, was probably the best hope for that country in
terms of bringing out of complete backwards and into some semblance of
modern infrastructure and social progress.

There was of course, the internecine internal feuding between the two
factions, Khalq and Parcham, much corruption and hypocrisy, so on and so
forth, but the military-supported overthrow of the king led to definite
advancements. For starters, the government passed laws declaring illegal
the selling and bartering of women, enforced land redistribution
programs to wrest away power from the landlords, and stopped the
privatization of water resources. In the cities, there were education
opportunities for women as well as men. Soviet aid and technicians were
pouring in. The government blundered badly in failing to properly
mobilize the rural villagers, who live in 90% of the country, to their
side; they sent out over-zealous hordes of city youth to "educate" them
and broadcast propaganda over TV stations when most people didn't even
own radio.

But these are problems that time could probably have straightened out.
No such luck for any movement that's on the same planet as the USA. In
'79 Carter began bankrolling the Afghan warlords with what became under
Reagan a pretty massive weapons program. With the reactionaries
empowered at a crucial juncture, the Kabul government couldn't keep
things sufficiently under control anymore, and then the Russians came in
and engineered an internal coup, and then full-scale invasion, to
contain any fallout.

The rest is history, but the bottom line is that, socialism was no
longer in the cards, and radical Islam became the popular channel of
politicization.

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