Theories and Practices of the Vanguards and of the Enlightened Despotisms

The current storm is not synonymous with revolution, but is only the potential carrier of revolutionary advances. Not simple are the responses of the peripheral peoples, whether inspired by radical socialist ideals—at first, anyway (Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba)—or by national liberation and social progress (in Latin America, in Asia and Africa during the Bandung period).

The historical Marxisms of the Third International (Russian Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Maoism) deliberately and completely rejected any retrograde outlook. They chose to look toward the future, in what was in the full sense of the term a universalist emancipating spirit. This option was undoubtedly made easier, in Russia, by a long preparatory period in which the (bourgeois) ‘westernizers’ van­quished the ‘Slavophile’ and ‘Eurasian’ allies of the autocracy and, in China, by the Taiping Uprising (I here refer you to my work: The Paris Commune and the Taiping Revolution).

At the same time, those historical Marxisms committed themselves to a certain conceptualization of the role of ‘vanguards’ in social transformation. They gave an institutionalized form to that option, symbolized as ‘The Party’. It cannot be said that this option was ineffective. Quite to the contrary, it was certainly at the ori­gin of the victory of those revolutions. The hypothesis that the minority vanguard would win support from the immense majority proved to be well founded. But it is equally true that later history showed the limits of such effectiveness. For it is cer­tain that maintenance of centralized power in the hands of these ‘vanguards’ was far from uninvolved in the subsequent derailment of the ‘socialist’ systems that they claimed to have established.

Were the theory and practice of those historical Marxisms that of ‘enlightened despotism’? One can say so only on condition of specifying what were and— progressively—became the aims of those ‘enlightened despotisms’.

The vanguard concept was also broadly adopted elsewhere beyond those (Chinese and Russian) revolutionary societies. It was the basis for the Communist parties of the whole world as they existed between 1920 and 1980. It found its place in the contemporary national/populist third-world regimes. Moreover, this vanguard concept gave decisive importance to theory and ideology, implying in turn putting similar importance on the role of (revolutionary) ‘intellectuals’ or, rather, of the intelligentsia.

‘Intelligentsia’ is not synonymous with the educated middle classes, still less with the managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, or professoriate (in Anglo-Saxon jar­gon, the ‘elites’). It refers to a social group that emerges as such in some societies under specific conditions and becomes then an active, sometimes decisive, agent. Outside Russia and China, analogous formations could be recognized in France, in Italy, and perhaps in other countries—but certainly not in Great Britain, the United States, nor generally in northern Europe.

In France, during most of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia held a major place in the country’s history, as, for that matter, is recognized by the best histori­ans. This was, perhaps, an indirect effect of the Paris Commune during which the ideal of building a more advanced stage of civilization beyond capitalism found expression as nowhere else (see my article on the Commune). In Italy the post­fascist Communist Party had an analogous function.

As Luciana Castillana lucidly analyzes it, the Communists—a vanguard strongly supported by the working class but always an electoral minority—were actually the sole makers of Italian democracy. They exercised ‘in opposition’—at the time—a real power in society much greater than when associated with ‘gov­ernment’ subsequently! Their actual suicide, inexplicable otherwise than as result of the mediocrity of their post-Berlinguer leadership, buried with them both the Italian State and Italian democracy.

This intelligentsia phenomenon never existed in the United States nor in Protestant Northern Europe.

In the peripheral societies in general, beyond the flagrant cases of Russia and China, and for the same reasons, the initiatives taken by ‘vanguards’, often intel­ligentsia-like, profited from the adhesion and support of broad popular majorities. The most frequent form of those political crystallizations whose interventions were decisive for the ‘Southern Awakening’ was that of populism. A theory and prac- ticescoffed at by the (Anglo-Saxon style, i.e., pro-system) ‘elites’, but defended and accordingly rehabili-tated by Ernesto Laclau with solid arguments that I will very largely make my own.

Of course, there are as many ‘populisms’ as there are historical experiences that can be called such. Populisms are often linked to ‘charismatic’ figures whose ‘thought’ is accepted, undiscussed, as authoritative. The real social and national advances linked to them under some specific conditions have led me to term them ‘national/populist’ regimes. But it must be understood that those advances were never based on ordinary ‘bourgeois’ democratic practices, still less by the incep­tion of practices going still further, like those possible ones which I will outline further on in this text. Such was the case in Ataturk’s Turkey, probably the initiator of this model in the Middle East, and later in Nasser’s Egypt, the Baathist (Iraqi and Syrian) regimes in their initial stages, and Algeria under the FLN.

I have put forward analyses dealing with the reasons for the success of advances realized in this domain by several Middle-Eastern countries (Afghanistan, South Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq) which appeared more promising than others, and also the causes of their tragic failures. Whatever the case, one must be on guard against gen­eralizations and simplifications like those of most Western commentators, who look only at the “democracy question” as boiled down to the formula that I have described as the democratic farce. In the peripheral countries the farce sometimes appears as a fantastic burlesque. Without being ‘democrats’ some leaders, charismatic or not, of national/populist regimes have been progressive ‘big reformers’. Nasser was exemplary of these. But others have scarcely been anything but incoherent clowns (Khadafi) or ordinary ‘unenlightened’ despots (quite uncharismatic, to boot) like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and many others. For that matter, those dictators initiated no national/ populist experiments. All they did was to organize the pillage of their countries by mafias personally associated to them. Thus, like Suharto and Marcos, they were sim­ply executive agents of the imperialist powers which, moreover, hailed them and sup­ported their powers to the very end.

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