Report from comrades in Afghanistan to the CPA (M-L)

Written by: Afghan comrades on 11 November 2026

 

We are very pleased to have established contact with an underground network of Communists in Afghanistan, and have agreed to share analytical materials with them. Here is one such analysis from our comrades on the political economy of Taliban rule – eds. 

 

To: Comrade Nick G., Chairperson, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) – CPA (M-L)
From: The International Relations and Coordination Committee of the Akhgar and Rustakhiz Study Circles (Afghanistan)
Subject: The Political Economy of Afghanistan Under Taliban Fascism: Structures of Exploitation, Class Contradictions, and the Horizon of Struggle

Theoretical Introduction: The Nature of the Political Superstructure and Economic Base

Following the strategic political shift in August 2021 and the chaotic withdrawal of US-NATO imperialism, the political superstructure in Afghanistan transformed into a clerical-fascist, totalitarian, and semi-feudal colonial regime. Contrary to bourgeois propaganda and imperialist media narratives that frame this transition as the "end of occupation and achievement of national independence," a critical critique of political economy reveals that the Taliban is not an independent entity. Rather, they act as an instrument to stabilize an even more naked phase of economic bondage and reproduce pre-capitalist relations tightly linked to the global circuit of capital.

The rule of Taliban fascism is the objective intersection of "comprador (bureaucratic) capitalism" in urban centers and "decaying semi-feudal relations" in the countryside, locking the vast masses of the urban proletariat and poor peasantry within a vice of brutal exploitation. This document delineates the four specific structural axes of exploitation within this geography.

1. Extractive Industries: Plunder of Minerals and Direct Dispossession

• Objective Empirical Data: The Taliban regime secures the vast majority of its military and intelligence budget through the unregulated concession and aggressive extraction of coal, copper, iron, and lithium deposits. Coal extraction in the northern region (Sar-e Pol and Samangan provinces) has grown exponentially, with annual exports to neighbouring countries reaching over 4 to 5 million tons. The regime's direct share from royalties and mining customs duties has risen to over 35% to 40% of total domestic revenues. Conversely, the wages of coal miners have catastrophically dropped to less than $50 to $80 USD per month. Laborers toil inside non-standard extraction shafts completely devoid of basic safety and life-support systems, leading to the annual deaths of dozens of mining proletarians due to tunnel collapses and asphyxiation.

• Theoretical Analysis (Karl Marx): In Volume 1 of Capital (Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation), Karl Marx explains that capitalism, during crises or in sub-developed contexts, relies on the naked plunder of natural resources and the absolute exploitation of raw physical labor . By usurping public ownership over national resources, the fascist regime has engineered the contradiction between "labor and capital" in its crudest geometric form. The bureaucratic capital of the Emirate extracts "absolute surplus value" by relentlessly extending the daily working hours of the miners.

2. Predatory Fiscal Extraction and Parasitic Accumulation

• Objective Empirical Data: According to official data from the World Bank, the Taliban regime has driven domestic revenue collection to approximately 19.8% of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This surge is not the byproduct of industrial growth or infrastructural production, but the result of an aggressive, multi-layered fiscal extraction system. Customs tariffs on basic commodities and food items for the masses have increased up to 30%. Shopkeepers, small informal workshops, and urban petty-traders are forced to pay double taxes and corporate fees under religious pretenses (such as forced Ushr and Zakat), marking a 200% increase in fiscal extortion compared to the pre-2021 period. This occurs while 90% of the population languishes below the absolute poverty line, and the real unemployment rate hovers near 75%.

• Theoretical Analysis (V. I. Lenin): In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin illustrates how reactionary states become instruments of extortion to serve a ruling minority and comprador relations . The Taliban's fiscal system is a prime manifestation of "parasitic accumulation." By draining the last financial drops from the urban proletariat and the decaying petty-bourgeoisie, the regime centralizes wealth into its military-clerical bureaucracy to maintain the state repressive apparatus against potential mass uprisings.

3. Gender Apartheid: The Economic Function of Female Exclusion and Enslavement

• Objective Empirical Data: The structure of religious fascism has physically excised half of the living social body from the public sphere:

• Exclusion from Education: 100% of women and girls are barred from education beyond the 6th grade and higher education in universities (affecting more than 1.4 million female students and hundreds of thousands of university undergraduates).

• Exclusion from Employment: Over 92% of women previously employed in civil service, textile factories, healthcare sectors, and civic organizations have been forcibly confined to their homes.

• Objective Status Within Our Circles: It is with profound revolutionary grief, yet intense class rage, that we declare that exactly 7 of our active female comrades within the Akhgar and Rustakhiz Study Circles are direct victims of this gender apartheid. These dear comrades have been stripped of their right to university education and social employment; they now continue their theoretical struggle underground within our secret cells amidst this suffocating terror.

• Theoretical Analysis (Mao Zedong): In his analysis of semi-feudal societies, Comrade Mao Zedong demonstrated that women are bound by four thick ropes of oppression: political authority, clan authority, religious authority, and masculine authority . Taliban fascism has turned these four ropes into iron chains. From the viewpoint of historical materialism, this exclusion is not merely a cultural prejudice; by functionally transforming women into domestic captives, the regime relies on them as a "free reproductive labor force" to bear the burden of mass survival under structural poverty, sparing the state any expenditure on social welfare or public health.

4. The Strategy of the Akhgar and Rustakhiz Study Circles and Alignment with the CPA (M-L)

Your party, the CPA (M-L), has consistently maintained a firm stance against the exploitation of the masses by monopoly capital and imperialist interventions. Recognizing this, we declare that the economic structure of contemporary Afghanistan is a stark example of bureaucratic-comprador capitalism and warlord-feudalism, functioning within the global imperialist chain to supply cheap raw materials (minerals) while executing the violent suppression of labor.
In the face of this total fascism, our circles have organized our fighting strategy along two primary axes:

• The Urban Front (Akhgar): Building clandestine cells among the industrial and workshop proletariat in cities, raising the historical and theoretical consciousness of the working class, and secretly guiding small bread-and-survival protests toward understanding the primary contradiction of society.

• The Rural Front (Rustakhiz): Penetrating the peasant masses who have been economically devastated by the regime's agrarian extractions and consecutive droughts, exposing the semi-feudal nature of the Taliban's rural backers, and promoting rural class solidarity and methods of self-reliance.
The active presence of female comrades in our underground cells proves that the revolutionary movement in Afghanistan cannot triumph without the total class and gender liberation of women. Theoretical and media cooperation with your party serves as a vital step toward exposing this fascist machinery globally and reinforcing the internationalist proletarian front.

Down with Taliban Fascism and Its Imperialist Backers!
Long Live Proletarian Internationalism!
The International Relations and Coordination Committee
Akhgar and Rustakhiz Study Circles (Afghanistan)
November 2026

Scientific and Internationalist References

1. The World Bank (2025-2026): Afghanistan Economic Monitor: Reports on Internal Revenue Extraction Frameworks and Structural Poverty Indices.
2. United Nations Development Programme - UNDP (2025): Socio-Economic Appraisals on Unemployment, Food Insecurity, and the Impact of Gender Apartheid on Unpaid Domestic Reproductive Labor in Afghanistan.
3. Marx, Karl (1867): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume I), Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation and the Theory of Absolute Surplus Value Extraction.
4. Lenin, V. I. (1916): Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Elaborations on the Parasitic State and Comprador Looting in Oppressed Nations.
5. Mao Zedong (1927): Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan & Selected Works on the Four Thick Ropes of Oppression Binding Women in Semi-Feudal Social Formations.

 

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