Nation-Building and/or Socialist Construction in the Radical Countries of the Periphery
The great national liberation movements of Asia and Africa that came into open conflict with the imperialist order, like those that led revolutions in the name of socialism, had to face the conflicting demands of ‘catching up’ (‘nation-building’) and transforming social relations in favour of the popular classes.
With regard to the second of these tasks, the ‘post-revolutionary’ (or simply post-independence) regimes of Asia and Africa were certainly less radical than the Communist regimes—which is why I call them ‘national-populist’. Sometimes they drew inspiration from organizational forms (single party, undemocratic rule, a state-run economy) that had been developed in the experiences of ‘actually existing socialism’, but they generally watered them down through vague ideological choices and compromises with the past.These were the conditions under which the regimes in place, as well as the critical vanguards (historical Communism), were asked to support the Soviet Union (or, more rarely, China) and invited to enjoy its support. The constitution of this common front against the imperialist aggression of the United States and its European and Japanese partners was certainly beneficial to the peoples of Asia and Africa; it created a degree of autonomy both for the initiatives of their ruling classes and for the activity of popular classes. The proof of this is what happened subsequently, after the Soviet collapse. Even before it, those ruling classes which opted for ‘the West’ on the illusory grounds that this would be favourable to them obtained nothing in the end. (In Sadat’s Egypt, the main case in point, the calculation was that a friendly United States, holding nearly all the cards on the Palestinian issue, could turn the situation round in favour of the Arab and Palestinian cause!) Indeed, their capitulation encouraged the deployment of the strategic offensives of imperialism and, in the case of Israel, strengthened the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.
This is not to say that Moscow did not impose dubious conditions on political forces that were ranged alongside the popular classes in countries allied to it—and, in particular, on the local Communist parties.
One might have thought that, within the anti-imperialist front, these parties would preserve all their autonomy of movement—a recognition of the conflicting interests and social projects among the partners involved in the front. For the ruling classes were ultimately pursuing a capitalist (though also ‘national’) project, whereas the satisfaction of popular class interests required going beyond a perspective whose narrow limits had already been demonstrated in history. But the fact is that the Soviet state fed the illusions that the national capitalist project carried within it, and thereby undermined the autonomous expression of the popular classes. The invention of a theory of the ‘non-capitalist road’ expressed this choice.There can be no doubt that during the Bandung era (1955-1980) it was difficult to draw a distinction between the interests of governments and the interests of their peoples. The regimes had only recently emerged out of huge national liberation movements (which had routed imperialism in its old ‘colonial’ or ‘semicolonial’ forms), or sometimes out of genuine revolutions associated with those movements, as in China, Vietnam and Cuba. They were still ‘close’ to their peoples, and enjoyed great legitimacy.
The example of Arab Communism sheds some light on the tragic consequences of this rallying to the idea of a ‘non-capitalist road’. A large majority of Arab Communists accepted the Soviet proposals and became, at best, the ‘left wing’ of the anti-imperialist national-populist regimes, giving them scarcely critical, virtually unconditional support. Two examples of this were the self-dissolution of the Egyptian Communist Party in 1960 in the deluded hope what it would be allowed to breathe new life into the Nasserite Socialist Party; and the rallying of Khaled Bagdash in Syria to the thesis that only nation-building (not even spelled out as non-capitalist) was the order of the day. I have expressed my views on this elsewhere, most notably at the time when many of the activists of the period were publishing their memoirs in Egypt.
I concluded that Arab Communism as a whole had not essentially left the framework of the ‘national-populist’ project, and had failed to see that in the end this fitted into a strictly capitalist perspective. This was not an ‘opportunist’ conjunctural orientation on its part, but a structural choice that expressed the original deficiencies of the Communist parties in question, the ambiguity of the ideologies they promoted, and ultimately their ignorance of the popular classes whose immediate and long-term interests they were supposed to be defending. The result of this unfortunate option was a loss of Communist credibility once the national-populist regimes reached their historical limits and suffered an erosion of legitimacy. Since the Communist left had not presented itself as an alternative beyond national populism, a vacuum was created on the political stage that opened the way for the disastrous rise of political Islam.It is true that small numbers of Arab Communists rejected this unconditional rallying to the policies of the Soviet state; the examples of the Qawmiyin and their emulators in South Yemen, or a few other ‘Maoist’ nuclei, bear testimony to this. But they did not depart from the original Leninist thesis that revolution was ‘imminent’, which they shared with the Guevarist movements of Latin America and the Naxalites in India. The defeat of the courageous movements they inspired shows with hindsight that Lenin’s thesis was wrong and based on tragic simplifications.
The no less tragic history of the South African Communist Party forms part of a similar downward slide. In the 1920s the SACP enjoyed the support of a majority of the African popular classes, while the ANC comprised only a minority of the petty bourgeoisie. Yet, on Moscow’s advice, the Party wound itself up and offered the leadership of the national movement to the ANC on a platter, with the consequences we know.
In contrast, the Indian Communists, under the influence of Maoism, mostly kept a critical distance from Congress and rejected the thesis of a ‘non-capitalist road’. As we have seen in the ch. on India, this is doubtless why they have survived the disaster and are in a better position than others to face the new challenges.
A further contrast is the sizeable fraction of the Latin American left which, under Cuban influence, detached itself from official Communism. The polemics that took place on this occasion—under the banner of the first version of depend- encia theory—served useful functions and explain, at least in part, why the attachment to democracy has more solid roots there.
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