Utopian Visions for the Women of Afghanistan
”Womens’ Rights” do not arrive from on high from the Americans or any political ruler; they reflect the material base.
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As Marxist-Leninists, we understand that the lives of women are affected mostly by material conditions. There is only so much anyone can legislate on that count. Women generally have problems throughout Afghanistan, whether the Islamic Emirate is weak or strong. It’s uniform throughout the country, and the reason it’s uniform throughout the country is because the country has a pretty similar mode of production throughout, because that is how countries tend to work, but also because a hostile occupying force just spent twenty years bombing it into a stone age opium colony. Stone age is their term, not mine. I was in America when they invaded. I remember what they said. I remember who they are.
No Marxist-Leninist thinks that any administration in the world is going to gain power and, before even declaring a state, immediately institute “womens’ rights”. That is clearly impossible, because Afghanistan is a part of the Earth, and so follows the same rules and laws of history, physics, cause and effect, as everywhere else in the world. If you want women to stop being treated the way women are treated in feudal opium colonies, you have to first develop the country beyond a feudal opium colony.
As an example I can bring up is India where I lived for a few years in the late 2010’s. Although India’s constitution from the day of independence was among the best of the world and guaranteed equal rights for women in terms of political representation, employment, education, etc, international assessments of womens’ rights there generally place it about on par or worse with Afghanistan, like this one where it’s #1, ahead of Afghanistan. Hospitals in India all have signs saying that they don’t tell people the sex of fetuses because it’s illegal to do that because people just abort girls straight up. The streets have advertisements for quack “fertility clinics” right next to surrogacy pimps. I know women well into their 20’s and 30’s with curfews of like, 8:00. Some of them aren’t even set by their parents but by their landlords, universities, and even employers.
The mainstream political response in India has been to throw “feminism” at the problem, as though the country doesn’t already have some of the most progressive anti-rape legislation in the world, full equal rights in terms of political representation, employment, education, progressive quotas, etc. Some people, noticing this, focus on appealing to morality(!) of “men” to obey the laws or propose a stronger police presence, which, they tried that in Afghanistan, too; it didn’t work.
Part of the self-perpetuating political mythology of this mode is that everyone in Afghanistan wore sexy miniskirts until the fire nation (ie America, because imperialism is when white people) attacked. In the (not even neo-)colonial imagination of Afghanistan, the Taliban —here treated as a static, unchanging ideological organisation with no relationship to the mode of production — was alchemised from America’s witch cauldron out of nothing, like a demon servant of the Underworld to fight off the Brezhnev’s “socialist” Soviet Union, obviously the good guy in all this, because contrarianism. Then, after they seized power, (because American-created astroturf governments are so good at doing that in Afghanistan,) they implemented a static, unchanging, unevolving ideological line, and that’s why women don’t have “freedom”.
In the past twenty years, it became politically incorrect to say that the ideological line of this organisation comes from the Qur’an. But at the time of the creation of the myth, that’s what was clearly blamed. The colonial imagery invoked is older than the American invasion, it’s older than the Great Game, it’s older than Wounded Knee and older than the Crusades. It’s that tribal societies are static and unchanging, especially Muslim ones, and that’s been justified at various points in history by people saying all sorts of dumb shit. For example, Ernest Renan, 1882:
“Islam is a close union of the spiritual and the temporal; it is the reign of a dogma, it is the heaviest chain that humanity has ever borne. . . .Islam has its beauties as a religion; . . . .But to the human reason Islamism has only been injurious. The minds that it has shut from the light were, no doubt, already closed in their own internal limits; but it has persecuted free thought, I shall not say more violently than other religions, but more effectually. It has made of the countries that it has conquered a closed field to the rational culture of the mind. What is, in fact essentially distinctive of the Musalman is his hatred of science, his persuasion that research is useless, frivolous, almost impious — the natural sciences, because they are attempts at rivalry with God; the historical sciences, because they apply to times anterior to Islam, they may revive ancient heresies. . . .”
If you don’t see echoes of this in the modern global war on “terror” I think you’re an idiot. I’ll hold off on further examples because this is a short thinkpiece, not an academic essay, and I’ve made my point, inshallah. Although most if asked will admit that America really didn’t go to war in Afghanistan over “womens’ rights”, there seems to be a liberal consensus that the American invasion was a big gender diversity win and the victory of the Taliban is a reactionary backslide into “the heaviest chain that humanity has ever born”, which is, of course, a scarf on their heads.
What you’ll notice is that this history consists entirely of people “thinking” things and not a lot of producing things or even like, warring, or governing. The question of whether there’s basic rule of law, or industrialisation, or whether the government regards every male above the age of 15 as an “enemy combatant” who can be legally killed in broad daylight without charge, arrest, or trial, are entirely omitted in this narrative. They think that the Taliban are a liberal organisation like them, whose main considerations are their own personal opinions, and who are trying to petition the government to have women banned. That it’s an ideological organisation along the lines of, like, I don’t know, Focus on the Family or Mothers Against Drunk Driving or some shit. In the colonial imagination, cultural change is a matter of opinion, and opinion havers are the primary driving force of social change. (For some reason, this fantasy is especially common among people whose main talent is having opinions.)
Crucially, “the international community” puts small nations in a headlock through this discursive fantasy. Per the demonstrable example of India, which again on paper has better formal legal rights than many western countries, this strategy absolutely does not work. It’s a self-replenishing cudgel which can be used to batter any government at any time with a slight shift in the discursive winds, and who controls those? Marxism-Leninism is principally opposed to this understanding of what we’ll call “womens’ issues”, and also to the disingenuous obscurantist backstabbing of smaller countries, which is really a way to delegitimise governments, weaken rule of law, and exact economic concessions. It is obvious to a Marxist Leninist that this cannot actually positively affect women as a broad mass in the way the liberal fantasy promises.
All of this has created an understanding among elements of what calls itself “the left” that the Taliban are primarily ideological, that they are a traditional political party with a platform (yet still undisciplined hooligans) and that that platform is “reactionary” due to being “religious extremism”.
This is not only untrue but actually categorically impossible. A reactionary organisation wants to either impede progress to a higher mode of production or to restore a previous, lower mode of production. Marxist-Leninists in most countries of the world today understand that capitalism is reactionary, and wish to resolve what Engels called the contradiction between a social mode of production and an individual mode of appropriation.
The Taliban, as of now, is not, and cannot be, a reactionary organisation, because Afghanistan, like much of South Asia, has a feudal mode of production. Modes of production are built through strong centralised governments; I know that you know this. In order for mercantilism to develop, let alone for a country to industrialise, it must not only cease to expect an average of 20 bombs per day to be dropped on its roads, factories, schools, and hospitals by an occupying plunderer, it must also maintain basic rule of law.
To expel the Americans and their allies, to establish basic rule of law, is not reactionary, but progressive in a real, Marxist-Leninist sense. The Taliban does not claim to be a Marxist-Leninist party. This is in its favour, because a reactionary means of preventing a Marxist-Leninist revolution is to mislead the people as to what Marxism-Leninism is: what are the conditions for a revolution, what does it entail, how do you know when you did it.
It should not claim to be a Marxist-Leninist party because it is not one, but it is many things that a Marxist-Leninist party must be. It has emerged organically from the existing networks of power in a country. Its power base is entirely within its own country, and it is organised in such a way as to emerge victorious in a twenty year war against one of the most brutal, undisguised colonial regimes in human history. Its forms are familiar to the people it rules and the people accept them. For twenty years, it was not only illegal, but at war with the collaborationist state. Liberal democracy was not able to recuperate it within that entire period.
This is something difficult to understand for people living in liberal democracies. The archetypal liberal democracy, the United States, was specifically built to empower and legitimise the ruling class, and to be so conservative in bringing about change as to take nearly a hundred years to abolish permanent, hereditary, racial chattel slavery. It is not made to produce social change, as the Americans are told when they attend “education”, but to prevent the change which naturally occurs in human societies.
The Taliban is structurally the complete opposite of a liberal democracy like that in the United States, and this is to its benefit. The Taliban is a network of tribal relations, which are fluid and dynamic. Afghanistan will undergo social change as it is developed and undergoes economic change. The Taliban will fill the role of a party which can mediate and guide this change, and its success in doing so will depend on whether or not it adopts a solid ideological line. Marxist-Leninists in Afghanistan should be making sure that the country pursues a Marxist-Leninist line of development, rejecting revisionist innovations like the Chinese model.
The greatest lesson from the success of the Taliban, its warm welcome by the people of Afghanistan, and the peaceful victory in Kabul which so closely mirrors that of Mecca is that to rule requires guns and force to expel foreign invaders and guard against all threats, foreign and domestic. However, the people will not welcome you unless you actually demonstrate your legitimacy and fitness to govern by seizing power and governing effectively instead of constantly posing for photo ops and giving bullshit speeches about freedom while your paid opposition goes on TV and undermines you every 2–5 years as happens in western “democracies”. It also cannot be done by hiring more and more paid goons as the collaborationist government did. A strong ruler does not respond with “outrage” and limp-dicked petitions for new laws every time a woman gets bisected and eaten in Uttar Pradesh, but is respected by the people and so listened to when he speaks.
On one hand the liberals claim that they respect liberal “democracy”, yet when “their own” liberal “leadership” and “their own” ruling class tells them that the Taliban are not a terrorist or extremist organisation but the ruling party of Afghanistan, who now have fewer sanctions against them than Iran, they refuse to listen, and have a meltdown and cut off their friendships with other internet opinion havers for having the wrong one. In fact every two to five years, they throw a complete fit saying that the election can’t have been real, that the real president is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or some other hilarious choice, never somebody worth respecting as even a person, let alone as a ruler of a country. The joke goes that the transition of power in Kabul was smoother than the one in DC.
The point is, the Taliban, being a coalition of tribal interests, is ultimately accountable to at least some of the people, and it will always have to work to maintain that power base. If it ever loses that power base by going against the people, if it ever becomes what liberals think it is, its rule will not last; it will be overthrown by networks which have overthrown far worse. It is not a liberal organisation, and it is also not an instrument of rule by the bourgeoisie. If it ever becomes those things, it will lose legitimacy, and be overthrown.
If you want womens’ conditions to improve in Afghanistan, then the thing you want is for the country to develop its industry and infrastructure, period. That is the only thing that will ever improve womens’ conditions. Women in Afghanistan are in the condition they are in not because of opinion havers floating in the aether but because of the material conditions they live under. That also means you want a strong, centralised government accountable to the people, which is not at war with the people but rather is respected and held in very high esteem by the people. Well, there you go.
The economic development of the country will not be something a handful of men called the Taliban will decide. It will either refuse to oppress them by embracing a socialist mode of production, or it will be abandoned by the people who it begins to oppress. The liberal regimes that most of its “critics” live under is a mechanism of maintaining the rule of an oppressor class. It is not something natural that automatically exists everywhere on Earth. It is something built by centuries of rule by an exploitative class. No such infrastructure exists in Afghanistan, and the attempts of the most powerful oppressor on Earth to build one have suffered a humiliating defeat. As long as the Emirate’s aim is to maintain credibility in the eyes of the people, it cannot attempt to build one, either.
You are deeply concerned. Good for you. That’s an appropriate reaction to have. Geopolitics is scary. But take the win. Celebrate the defeat of “your” governments and their allies in a reactionary war as Lenin said to, while reflecting that you were unsuccessful in converting it into a civil war; you did not even try because of your own organisational and ideological shortcomings. Instead you banged the war drum when your direct oppressors told you to!
This is the reality. May they rule justly and never attempt to oppress the people. May they swiftly develop the country, repelling all invaders and reaction, internal and external, and long live their just, progressive reign with a solid, consistent, evolving ideological line.
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