WHAT IS AFGHANISTAN REALLY LIKE?
Roy, Olivier
Thefollowing article, reprinted with permission from the excellent French monthly Espirit (in some respects a French Dissent), presents thefirst serious social portrait we have seen of Afghanistan...
...The villagers considered them foreigners...
...Villages are grouped around sources of water and separated by great stretches of desertlike terrain...
...The local administration, when there is such a thing, is usually not fired with zeal, so, from one day to the next, a cadre arrives in the village...
...The tourist trade destroyed certain traditional trade channels and by pushing up the prices of certain merchandise (the famous Afghan coat, for instance, got to be completely out of reach for most Afghans...
...And this cohesion is reinforced by the not inconsiderable factor of religion...
...the model that suited them: a modernity propelled into existence by a bureaucracy...
...In my experience, the first thing the new cadre did upon arriving in Alingar was to come to our host's home and inspect our luggage...
...One must, then, examine this failure because in it we may find the key to why many revolutions in the Third World have turned out badly...
...But these factors are not enough to create a class of exploited peasants: the small-scale landowner who is in debt will still manage to live as a small-scale landowner, particularly since his creditor is not necessarily a notable but may be another small landowner like himself...
...Culturally and in relation to their daily way of life, the Afghan peasants are much closer to the local notable than to the government functionary or the revolutionary cadre, both of whom come from the city, dress in Western style, and are bored stiff...
...This is what the Afghan peasants consciously expected from the overthrow of the old regime...
...The occupation was methodical...
...and so they strained the patience of the modernist-oriented Afghans, especially because the hippies loved those very aspects of the country that the progressives despised and sought to flee: its Middle Ages, its nonchalant rejection of progress...
...Most Afghans live a long way from the central government, from which they can expect only troubles (the most recent revolution will not change their minds on this score...
...But those who use this as an argument for opposing a Russian withdrawal forget that the problem is no longer a choice of this or that government—which would, after all, be the Afghans' business, not ours—but the question of the survival of a people...
...In turn, they considered the centuries-old behavior of the peasants an obstacle to social progress—or what they thought of as progress: access to a modernity that fascinated them and of which they felt cheated...
...There is only a foreign power supported by a few collaborators or by unconvinced administrators...
...These people felt boxed in by traditional Afghan society, and its cohesiveness became a straitjacket for those who no longer subscribed to its values...
...there is certainly a form of exploitation that benefits the notables (the arbab or mdlek), but this is in no way specifically feudal...
...For an Afghan, this is tantamount to sending his daughter to a brothel...
...A few bombing and defoliation missions would do the job...
...the feeble local garrison carries no weight—it either fades away or joins the other side...
...He then announced that he was going to take a census of the population, issue identity cards, and establish a register...
...Where a majority of the population is rural, the agrarian question is fundamental...
...Marxism was the poor man's modernity...
...What is getting under way is genocide: as in Cambodia, hunger will kill more people than bullets until the survivors accept any solution, simply to survive...
...The small property is fragmented by inheritance...
...The failure is not to be explained as a result of unlucky happenstance or, as in the case of [Hafizullah] Amin, one individual's madness...
...The future revolutionary cadres thus got a smattering of a superficial Marxism, but never fora moment tried, as Marx or Lenin would have, to examine the concrete situation in their country...
...In Afghanistan, it is too late for the latter: between the occupying power and the people there are no means of communication that could bring about reforms without offending Islam...
...The West is also a world of tourists, especially hippies who, although they had much more money, still play-acted at being poor...
...he is often an old man with no special training who has achieved his position because of piety...
...Amin cannot be held solely responsible for the massacres: they began under [President Noor Mohammad] Taraki and continued under Babrak Karmal...
...At first glance, Afghan Islam does not appear to share the restless spirituality of Iranian Shi'ism...
...When you realize that the two Communist factions (Khalq and Parcham) together numbered no more than 5,000 members, it is clear there wasn't much left when the Russians intervened —not to chase out a tyrant but to fill the void that had imprudently been allowed to develop...
...This was true even of a very young boy who asked a traveler for an explanation of Christianity and ended up sharing his doubts about Mary's virginity...
...The new revolutionary cadre of Afghanistan, erstwhile teacher or student, saw the farmer as a pupil who had to be taught everything: how to wash, feed himself, dress, and, above all, how to think...
...But why turn to Moscow...
...No civil government, no census records, no direct administration except in the cities: the village m4lek provides a minimal representation with regard to the central government (callup for the armed services, collection of taxes, and so on...
...One must not visualize the Afghan notable in terms of one of our West European petty squires...
...As for "infiltrations" across the Pakistani border, they do not occur because of complicity on the part of the Pakistani government but because the latter is incapable of sealing off an artificial frontier peopled on both sides by the same tribes, the Pashtoons and the Pathans...
...But the religion of the countryside is centered entirely on rites and externals: woe to him who does not observe Ramadan, who drinks alcohol, whose conduct is immoral, or even woe to him who does not say his prayers...
...And especially, in his eager haste to find an escape, he read...
...What attracted these petty-bourgeois intellectuals was not socialism: it was simply modernity...
...Not only is such an analysis colonialist or racist, it conceals an important development: there was indeed a "revolution," or rather a leftist putsch, in Kabul in April 1978...
...Because it was the only exemplar of "modernity" within reach...
...The people's refusal to accept the revolution is what Georges Marchais [leader of the French Communist party] has called "feudalism...
...In the armed forces, a number of officers were more Nasserite than socialist...
...But, in reality, it was one more instance of ignorance of rural life...
...The Russians aren't even attempting it...
...Certain large estates existed only on paper and factually corresponded to property owned in common by groups of families under the name of the head of the 52 clan...
...I knew teachers and officers posted to the small mountain villages, in Laghman, Badakshan, and Nuristan...
...it also trained the military, especially the air force...
...The lower middle class— artisans and petty merchants—sought refuge in Islam, while the intellectual fringe adopted a local version of Marxism...
...For Afghans, their religion is much more than an agglomeration of practices: it is truly a vision of the world, and the source to which they invariably refer whenever they speak of justice, liberty, or ethics— in short, whenever they speak of humanity...
...the latter has a right to a share of the crop, which ranges from a half to a sixth depending on whether or not the worker brings his own tools and seed...
...furnished the staff of the Kabul Polytechnic...
...There is continuity in the system, even if Amin was more paranoid than the others...
...Granted, life is hard, especially for the women, who either live cloistered lives or are made into beasts of burden...
...Right now there is no more revolution...
...a guerrilla group is formed—scattered, uncoordinated, without heavy equipment, striking where- and whenever possible...
...or the cadre wants to check out marriage arrangements, or he forcibly enters a house to take the census...
...The Pakistani government's unwillingness to aid the guerrillas is obvious: it fears Pashtoon irredentism, and it has no wish to be drawn into even a local skirmish with the Russians...
...For this there are two possible explanations: among the key men, there were some former subscribers to Tel quel who had grasped that the revolution must take place in words if it is to take place at all...
...it is, rather, the logical consequence of the seizure of power by a fraction of the intellectual lower middle class, which finds in Marxism an ideology that promises to promote its own social advancement...
...Through the incantatory power of words an unrealizable "reality" should, must, emerge—such as "proletariat," "avant-garde," even "party," when there were only petty-bourgeois functionaries in their shirts and ties worried about promotions and lured by power...
...I remember a particular evening spent with a teacher from a village in the Petsh Valley during which I tried to explain to him the meaning of the word "subjectivism," which he had come across in a political text in Persian (Mobarze zed a soubjektivism: the struggle against subjectivism...
...or, second, Marxism has become the ideology of the upwardly mobile petty bourgeois of the Third World...
...Not all petty-bourgeois intellectuals followed this movement...
...they found a model of enlightened despotism applicable to the Third World...
...The idea of atheism is inconceivable...
...And the women who were supposed to be liberated are the first to burn...
...EDS...
...Some of the author's references are to French political figures, but no one should have much trouble finding American equivalents...
...Since they had no foothold in the countryside, and their social base could not have been narrower, they implemented their policy at first by decree and then at gunpoint...
...The revolution began in April 1978...
...SUPPOSEDLY, the Red Army intervened at the request of the party in power to liquidate the bloody dictatorship of Amin (who was that party's leader) and to fight the great feudal landlords who were supported by American imperialism and its Pakistani agents...
...It starts with an incident: the male teacher wants to compel the girls to go to school...
...The word "feudal," as Marchais uses it, does not refer to a mode of production in the Marxist sense but to technological backwardness that extends to the country's entire civilization: as in the case of the 19th-century colonialists, a country's backwardness alone is considered enough to justify colonization...
...The resistance is united only on paper...
...He may know Sa'di's Rose Garden by heart and still understand not one syllable of the news given over the Afghan radio...
...Because the revolutionary leaders were convinced that they were dealing with a "feudal" form of production, their reforms were concentrated on ownership of the land: they abolished mortgages (in itself a good thing), dismantled large estates, and limited private property to five hectares (ca...
...To abolish the bride-price without overhauling all regulations governing matrimony cannot lead to the liberation of women...
...may own 25 acres of irrigated land, a moderately well-off peasant from five to ten acres, and a poor one fewer or none...
...It would be a far cheaper war than the one in Vietnam—no jungles, no big cities...
...Modernist Afghans found in the U.S.S.R...
...The only "feudal" element in the Afghan countryside (in the Marxist sense of the term) is the unobtrusiveness of the state...
...For them, Marxism was no more than an access road to the highway of modernity...
...Peasants and notables dress and speak alike, they meet every day, their sons study with the same mullah...
...A rich peasant I The misuse of the word `feudalism" has been well analyzed by Jean-Pierre Chretien ("We Are All Feudal Afghan," Esprit, February 1980...
...48 tant, going as high as $40,000...
...If they entered the country with all the calculated risks that move implied (the end of detente, and, especially, loss of good will in the Muslim world), they must have good reasons—related, no doubt, to domestic politics...
...The April 1978 revolution was, for the most part, a revolution in name only...
...Thefollowing article, reprinted with permission from the excellent French monthly Espirit (in some respects a French Dissent), presents thefirst serious social portrait we have seen of Afghanistan society...
...As to what is really going on there, a certain consensus seems to exist in France, at least on the left: the old Afghan regime was a form of retrograde feudalism that one would hesitate to support even as one condemns Russian intervention...
...As an article in the Kabul Times explained, revolutionary violence can be necessary to drag the peasants from the obscurantism in which they are kept by "the great feudal landowners...
...And he did not hold this view necessarily out of any totalitarian spirit, but rather as an extension of his didactic assumption that the Afghan peasant knows only his prejudices...
...But there were not enough trained women teachers to go around, which meant that a girl might have a male teacher...
...Indeed, Soviet pilots crushed the mutinies of allegedly leftist units in Kabul and Herat that summer...
...This cycle started in the fall of 1978: the local administration is thrown out, the peasants organize around their traditional leaders, together with a few students or officers who have deserted...
...So the air force is convoked: it arrives on a strafing mission and every last soul in the valley promptly joins the resistance...
...they knew what they were doing...
...Official slogans talk, of course, of the working class...
...More often than not, the cadre is a young teacher or university student, dressed in Western clothes, with a red scarf around his neck and his Colt at his side...
...What I observed at first hand, in the township of Alingar, in Laghman Province, corresponds to the figures of Gilbert Etienne4: 25 percent of the population are rich landowners, 50 percent are middling landowners, and 25 percent are landless peasants who must hire themselves out as farmhands...
...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE 54...
...But behind the formalism, faith is very much alive...
...This was the one area in which the new regime could have given itself a class base by rallying the landless farm workers...
...People became interested in Afghanistan only after the Soviet intervention...
...But the peasants did not expect the overthrow of their societal patterns...
...it preferred to stick to what it knew (especially trade) rather than plunge into an industrialization that posed risks because the infrastructures were weak...
...The turning point came in the fall...
...At the height of [Amin's] massacres, Soviet advisers already controlled all the rolling stock the Afghan army and government possessed (some 5,000 units in August 1979...
...He bypasses the traditional hierarchy—and not only the mdlek but also the "wise men," the elders or teachers of folk tradition whose counsel the villagers habitually seek...
...A quarrel ensues...
...For Amin's dictatorship to crumble, all the Russians had to do was not to intervene but, on the contrary, to hold off...
...One has to have witnessed the yoke of village tradition (especially as practiced in Pashtoon or Nuristani villages), which considers any reform or even novelty almost a sin (bida'), to understand how the generous modernist spirit could be transformed into resentment, if not hatred, of peasant obscurantism...
...After a few days of climbing in the mountains, when the difficulty of ascent makes for intimacy, the guide will begin to talk of life and death and start to quote Sa'di or Hafiz...
...The revolution took place as foreseen, but foundered...
...Indirect exploitation works by the gerao system: a peasant borrows money at a usurious rate (50 percent), he leaves as bond a field he works, and the yield from it goes to the lender until the debt is paid off...
...in winter, there is snow...
...From 1975 on, revolution was in the air...
...12 acres...
...I saw this happen at Alingar in August 1978...
...They expected also a reform of the sharecropping system and an impartial control of the distribution of water and fertilizer...
...The occasions on which debt is incurred are frequent: supplementary food supplies between harvests and especially marriage (the bride-price is exorbi° G. Etienne, Afghanistan, or the Risks of Cooperation (Presses Universitaires de France, 1972...
...Well before the revolution, the petty bourgeois dressed like a West European, shaved his beard in favor of the small moustache characteristic of the leftist Afghan cadre, and replaced his turban with an astrakhan cap...
...The small agricultural landholders' income was diminishing because the size of individual parcels kept shrinking as a result of demographic pressure...
...The fundamental problem remains: the amount of arable land must be increased by extending the irrigation system...
...Even under the old regime, Soviet advisers outnumbered all others...
...Well and good...
...An assistant of his asked politely: "What is a proletarian, please...
...Peasants found themselves owners of land they could neither sow nor sometimes even irrigate...
...One further example of how this was a revolution in name only...
...The small-scale independent landowners constitute the majority —the proportion diminishing somewhat in the northern plains but increasing in the mountainous regions...
...And Soviet intervention is only to be explained by the fact that this putsch failed...
...On the face of it, a progressive, commonsensical measure...
...The social base of the putsch consisted of a petty bourgeois intellectual fraction: teachers (the mo'allem), students, civil servants, and officers of the technical branches of the armed forces, in particular the air force...
...In Afghanistan this is a possibility...
...He sets himself up as a mini-dictator, whereas traditionally society leaves each man responsible for what goes on under his own roof: for example, an Afghan is not only proud to have guests but he feels totally responsible for them...
...Mohammad] Daud replaced the king in 1973, promising rapid economic growth...
...There is neither a class of big landowners nor a mass of agricultural proletarians...
...A third and last example: schooling...
...The debt doubles regularly, given the rate of interest...
...There was a definite decline in income for the small landowner class in the years before the 1978 Communist revolution: however, changing the landownership statute was not sufficient to check this downturn (even had the change been made for this purpose, which was not the case...
...2 CERM pamphlet, "On Feudalism" (Editions Sociales, 1971), p. 13...
...Let one canal break or simply be poorly maintained, and a village dies...
...Faced with these frustrations, some peasants spontaneously returned the expropriated lands to which they had been given title to the previous owners in exchange for seed...
...One sector opted for a renovated Islam, in the tradition of the Muslim reformers of the 19th century who sought to reconcile religion with economic and social progress...
...It takes time to perceive, behind the facade of traditional courtesy, the fine points that distinguish the hierarchy...
...By July 1979 we could no longer return to the Laghman area—it was in full insurrection...
...It's no exaggeration to say that as a result no revolutionary political speech is comprehensible to the Afghan peasant even if he happens to possess a solid classical culture...
...A guerrilla movement is crushed by genocide or by political measures that deprive it of its social base...
...Education and production: nothing typically socialist, simply a shortened version of our [Western] 19th century...
...Why should the Russians withdraw...
...But this group of 30,000 does not yet constitute an authentic social class...
...Such crucial oversights are significant revelations of the ineptitude of the administration...
...I am not saying that Afghan society is egalitarian and democratic...
...The first contention is laughable...
...How does a village topple into rebellion...
...The village mullah is often illiterate and recites the set phrases without always fully comprehending them...
...Public instruction was abruptly made compulsory for both girls and boys...
...There was none of the understanding of the rural world that enabled Mao to make a Communist revolution with peasants...
...that is to say, the purchase of women...
...For two reasons: lack of a social base and failure of agrarian reform...
...The surly illiterate peasant will suddenly question the Westerner about materialism, and then as abruptly launch into a defense of his religion...
...The police or the army is called in...
...Their model became the city of the West as they conceived of it: factory, paved streets, cars, property, women without the veil (and accessible), marriage by choice, films, radio, electricity, alcohol sold without restrictions, and so on...
...The revolution of April 1978 was a military putsch with no popular support...
...There they were, forced to give lip service to religious practices that often no longer had any real meaning for them...
...The use of revolutionary vocabulary yields odd results...
...indeed, on every sen .:tive issue it offended them...
...And God knows, Afghans dote on such discussions...
...Nothing was envisaged for the countryside other than to bring it into line with the towns...
...We must also recognize that here land has no value unless irrigated: the fundamental problem is not land but water...
...In the Pashtoon countryside, such lapses may lead to death...
...At issue is the apportioning of water, and this is where the notables in a community can exert their influence so that certain people get extra water...
...When sowing time came around, after some initial hesitation the peasants shifted allegiance to the other camp...
...And since World War II and especially since Daud, Afghanistan has been in the Russian zone of influence...
...Without glossing over its inequities or technological backwardness, Olivier Roy paints a picture far more complex than the ignorant or malicious talk about `feudalism" that apologists and half-apologists for the Soviet invasion have spread...
...One sees here the same contempt for the culture of societies that are technologically weak, the same blind faith in a progress that rejects all vestiges of the past, the same ethnocentricity that congratulates the Red Army for having put an end to the economic exploitation of the native population—but which would never dare call on it to deliver, say, the Breton peasant from the tyranny of the Agricultural Credit Bureau...
...on the contrary, it deprives them of the only protection they have had...
...The regulations governing land ownership in Afghanistan vary widely, by region, but there are certain constants...
...How have these reforms been implemented...
...Word arrives that a convoy is on its way, people mobilize, carry out a daring attack, and then everyone scatters...
...And the one way to stay is to crush the guerrillas...
...In summer, the rocky terrain is burning hot...
...The army grew on paper but shrank on the ground...
...No one knew who would bring it to pass, but everyone suspected it would start with a military putsch...
...One must be careful not to create a myth about the resistance: it includes a little bit of everything —religious traditionalists, cadres of the old regime, student deserters, poor peasants, adventurers, and so on...
...There was no revolutionary situation in the countryside...
...But this is not a question of Russian propaganda...
...Isolated amid a population whose languages they sometimes did not speak, bachelors for years at a stretch since they could not put together the brideprice, and underpaid: they did not mix well 50 into village life...
...it is not the bearer of a new society (as Iranian Islam would like to be) and its victory would mean the reestablishment of traditional Afghanistan...
...I never saw him again and, for his sake, I hope that he was transferred to Kabul before the putsch...
...Now and then a Land-Rover comes by with several functionaries on an inspection tour...
...The proprietor had supplied tools to sharecroppers who had none: how can land be cultivated without tools or draft animals...
...Nonirrigated land (l3lmi) is free: whoever sows it owns outright whatever he may reap...
...The state is represented in the countryside by a handful of teachers and by small, widely stationed garrisons of maybe a dozen soldiers dressed in rags (before the Russians came along to fit them out with uniforms) who doze away the day in broken-down barracks under the command of a hdkim, a sort of district chief...
...The organization of the Afghan peasantry remained complex but flexible...
...The teacher answered: "A worker...
...Once in power, they mechanically applied the simplified Marxist programs they had learned...
...There are two camps in Afghanistan: the occupation and the Afghan people...
...In the cities one finds theologians, educated for the most part in Cairo, and Muslim intellectuals...
...In general, he chose to read extracts (like Mao's Little Red Book) or basic tracts (the Communist Manifesto...
...In a remote village in Nuristan, I met a left-wing teacher who explained to me that in this village the "proletarian line" had to be made to prevail...
...Let us return, then, to those who made the revolution...
...This was a failure...
...But all these splinter factions were "laminated," as it were, by the April revolution and if they have survived at all, they now find themselves on the side of the rebels though without directing the movement, which, it seems, remains largely in the hands of the religious traditionalists...
...Problems of exploitation are overshadowed by a more basic issue—demographic pressure...
...Nor does the argument of foreign intervention hold water...
...In this same valley, the same teacher often proclaimed: "Proletarians of all 51 countries, unite...
...When one is fighting guerrillas, who move among the populace like fish in water, there is only one tactic, whether implemented by the Soviets or the Americans: remove the water...
...So great is the Afghan intellectual's scorn or just ignorance of his traditional culture that translators import the political vocabulary of West European languages almost wholesale, and simply transcribe it phonetically...
...The state had arrived...
...The real reason for Russian intervention was that the Afghan 1978 revolution foundered...
...somebody fires...
...To this day, the guerrillas are armed with miserable old rifles or weapons 47 recovered from the Afghan army, as anyone who has visited guerrilla units can attest...
...WHEN MARCHAIS SPEAKS of the despotism of the big landowners, he is defining feudalism not in Marxist terms but according to the cliches of history texts written during the Third Republic, which saw colonialism as the civilizing mission of the 19th century.' Whether one takes the word "feudal" in its narrow meaning ("agrarian workers have a right to use and to occupy the terrain, but the property itself belongs to a hierarchy of nobles"2) or in the broader sense ("neither the labor [of the field worker] nor the product of that labor has as yet become a simple object of free exchange"3), in neither case is Afghanistan a feudal country...
...3 Ibid., p. 15...
...The state means Kabul, and Kabul is the center of perdition, corruption, apostasy...
...At first, the Soviet Union underwrote the training of their cadres...
...A REVOLUTION is not made without a social base...
...Where would people hide, re-form their groups, train...
...Still, one sees the consequences of these prejudices: napalm is the extension of rapping the ruler on the knuckles ("It's their own fault, they've understood nothing...
...A crucial example is the agrarian reform...
...in August 1978 I witnessed its arrival at a small town in Laghman Province...
...We have, then, a poor country that is medieval rather than feudal, and in which for ten years economic problems have been getting worse...
...Now, in Afghanistan it doesn't exist—or rather, it is as embryonic as Afghan industry...
...and the same men continued to hold the same positions in the government...
...What does this Afghan "feudalism" consist of...
...I have actually had the experience of "translating" for peasant listeners—in my very imperfect Persian—the speeches of their cadres, which were gibberish for them but comprehensible to me only because the chief concepts were couched in the "isms" of my native language...
...In August 1978, the basic decrees were promulgated Erman no...
...The same malek assumes certain responsibilities: he pays the local mullah, sees to it that strangers are housed, and sometimes finances certain public works of local concern (especially in Nuristan...
...The modernity of the West—of money and of the great bourgeoisie—was inaccessible to them...
...And what is a worker...
...Members of the government seemed to relish killing each other off...
...Proletariat becomes proliter, democratic dimocratik, coup d'etat Koodeta (using the phonics of the Persian of Iran...
...Before expropriating anything, the new regime might have thought to set up a distribution system for water, seed, fertilizer, and implements...
...the rural exodus is negligible, and agricultural earnings do not increase...
...Further, the Afghan clergy is by no means 49 cohesive, like the Iranian clergy...
...However, what threatened the regime in Kabul was not this but its own lack of substance...
...There are no doctors, no reserves: even in peacetime there were none...
...A decree forbade the bride-price...
...The weak Afghan middle class lacked substantial capital resources...
...And the U.S.S.R...
...In 1970, the census reported 30,000 workers (as against 47,000 civil servants), who were better paid than the unskilled laborers who make up the mass of those who rely on their brawn to make a living...
...The masses grew poorer...
...Of course, in a country without a survey registry, it is hard to establish who owns what...
...In terms of food, the peasantry has always lived on the fringes of mere subsistence...
...When one recognizes that Muslim law permits the husband to repudiate his wife on the spot and that she thereby loses all rights over her children, one sees that the brideprice, which is forfeited in the event of divorce, is a powerful restraint against repudiation, at least for a poor Afghan or for one of modest means...
...Moreover, the capitalist economy's failure to get off the ground blocked all hope of upward mobility for them...
...Famine swept the countryside in 1971, 1972, and 1973...
...The exploitation may be direct: the owner may hire a farm worker or he may make an agreement with a sharecropper...
...53 the Party man is killed...
...this "government" runs everything...
...More important, in this country it is useless to partition the land if provision is not made for partitioning water and seed...
...In the U.S.S.R...
...The very large holding (more than 250 acres, which is not so enormous) is extremely rare...
...The previous barter system was unfair but at least it worked...
...Aside from the gerao system (explained below), the third group has no share in the property's yield and must subsist exclusively on what wages it earns...
...Many people take this position without realizing that they are covertly advancing an old colonialist argument that confuses technological backwardness with a lag of civilization and that, in the name of progress and history, justifies moving from an outdated to a newer mode of production at the expense of those who are supposed to benefit...
...Certainly, they would have preferred their proteges to have been able to hold power on their own, but now they are there, and they mean to stay...
...Local artisans were ruined by what few industries were set up, and by foreign trade...
...the same rendering applies to socialism, feudalism, imperialism, committee, and so on...
...its leadership could neither solve economic problems nor make itself even tolerable to the people...
...It was a question of setting in motion—via a strong and omnipresent government —social and economic progress not in order to achieve some sort of socialism but rather to establish industrialism on a vast scale, if necessary even against a peasantry...
Vol. 28 • January 1981 • No. 1
