—Its Emergence and Contours
“Wir wollen auf Erden glücklich sein
Und wollen nicht mehr darben.”
Heinrich Heine
General
The most striking political development of the last two
decades has been the emergence of what French geographers and social scientists
term the Tiers Monde—the Third World. This term is applied to a great bloc of
countries stretching from the Andean republics of South America, across Africa
and the Middle East, to Indonesia and the islands of the tropical Pacific. It
is made up of over a hundred political units, greatly differing in size, in
population or in political status. Some, like Pakistan or Indonesia, have
populations of close on one hundred million; others, like Gambia or Gabon, have
populations of under half a million and a problematic chance of long surviving
as isolated units. Some, like Cambodia or Cuba, are socialist in their
politics—though their socialisms are often very different from the western form
of socialism; others, like Saudi Arabia or Ethiopia, are feudal theocracies;
some, like Angola or Kenya, are still colonial territories of the old type;
some, like Guatemala or Katanga, are classic examples of “new colonialism”. All
are poor, most are backward, all are either crippled by lack of development or
deformed by exploitative development. They contain an aggregate population of
almost two thousand million people—two-thirds of the world total.
That their emergence should be treated as a “striking
phenomenon”, that we should still be unwilling to recognise the implications of
this emergence, serves to underline the ethno-centric, Western-oriented (if I
can use such a paradoxical term) character of our world vision . . . But, one
may stress, this “Third World” is relatively new—and its emergence means that
we have got to make an “agonising reappraisal” of our world view. For those of
you who are young this is not easy, since, born into, and living amid, a world
in flux, you cannot always realise that “the earthquakes of change” to which
you have grown accustomed, which, indeed, for you represent the normal world
condition, are symptomatic of the end of a world. And for those of us who are
older, who grew up in a world whose major lineaments seemed fixed and
unchanging (because we did not recognise that the Long March and the rioting in
India and the shooting down of Africans were the twisting birth pains of a new
world), it is no less difficult to adjust to the reality of an era in which
most of the old and familiar land marks—the Empire, the supremacy of Europe,
the dependence of Africa, the inscrutable chaos of the East—have disappeared,
along with Loretta Young and Laurel and Hardy . . .
“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”
“Not so very long ago,” says Sartre, “the world contained
two thousand million inhabitants, or five hundred million men and one thousand
five hundred million natives. The former possessed the World, the others
borrowed it . . .” [1] The emergence of the Third World is the assertion, by
this three-quarters of humanity who were “natives” of their human dignity. And
we in the West have not found it greatly to our liking that these folk, these
“natives”, should assert their humanity and demand that they, too, should be
heard, that the “four Freedoms” should be applied, not only to Nordics, or
Europeans, or Aryans, but to all men . . . And so the assertion of this
humanity had to be made with the machete and the machine gun; in armed conflict
the oppressed finds freedom and asserts his humanity so that, as Sartre puts it
“the weapon of a fighter, that is his humanity.” Vietnam and Cuba; Cyprus,
Kenya and Algeria, Angola and South Africa—all these are stages in the
progressive assertion of their humanity by the “damned of the earth” . . .
The Social Structure of the Third World
This Third World shows a great human diversity. It includes
white and black and brown and yellow peoples; it includes some of the oldest
civilisations created by man and great islands of primitiveness; it includes
countries still colonies and others with a Potemkin-facade of independence; it
includes Muslims and Marxists, Christians and Confucians, Buddhists, and
Animists . . . Yet whatever the diversity of colour or creed it has an
overriding unity and this tendency to unity comes, in the words of Ché Guevara,
“from a similarity in economic and social conditions and from a similarity in
desire for progress and recuperation.” [2] From Korea and Laos, across southern
Asia and the forests and deserts of Africa to the rich plantations of the
Caribbean and the parched backlands of Brazil, the emergent states of the Third
World share a common legacy of past humiliation, of exploitation and of
poverty, a legacy which binds together two thousand million people in a vast
“fellowship of the dispossessed”, a “commonwealth of poverty”.
The same Western impact which warped the economies and
prolonged the poverty of these countries has transformed their social
structure. The social pattern today is far from simple; Western influence
manifested itself in a variety of forms, from outright colonial conquest to
economic and cultural penetration. In some countries it has lasted for
centuries, in others it has been relatively recent; it fell, moreover, on
traditional societies differing greatly in complexity, sophistication and powers
of resistance. Nevertheless, in spite of this diversity, certain themes run
through the class structure and social geography of the countries of the Third
World, and before commenting on some of the variations it is perhaps helpful to
sketch in these general similarities and the role played by the various
classes. These roles are often different from the roles played by similar
classes in Europe or North America, and these differences are of critical
importance to an understanding of the socio-economic processes which shape both
the struggle for independence and the character of the emergent society. My
account draws heavily on the schema of the Algerian nationalist writer Frantz
Fanon; [3] Fanon’s work is critical to an understanding of the “colonial”
social situation and of the attitudes to Europe of an important group of Third
World thinkers.
The character of the bourgeoisie is of decisive importance
in any analysis of the contemporary social geography of the countries of the
Third World. The national bourgeoisie in the formerly colonial territories was
in large measure created by the colonial power. It was through this bourgeoisie
that the exploitation of the colonies’ resources was made possible and the
“civilising mission” of the colonial power initiated. Indeed, it is fashionable
to hold that the creation of this élite provides a justification for the whole
colonial process. In character and function this bourgeois élite is very
different from the classical bourgeoisie of the West. This latter group,
trained, dynamic, and venturesome, initiated the process of capital
accumulation, laid the foundations of modern industry and commerce and gave the
nation at least a minimum of prosperity. The colonial bourgeoisie has done none
of these things. Its functions have been largely those of an exploitative
middleman group, intermediary between the metropolitan economic interests and
the colonial masses. In its values it has aped the metropolitan bourgeoisie,
turning its back on, perhaps despising, the peasant masses who make up the
greater part of the population. Daniel Guérin comments caustically on the
attitudes of this group in the French Antilles. He speaks of “the need felt by
the bourgeois or petty bourgeois to consolidate his rather precarious social position
by increasing the distinction between himself and the ‘rest of them down
there’.” Guérin underlines the great gap between the city-dwelling élite and
those who toil on the land and, stressing the Europo-centric character of élite
culture, comments: “The Caribbean middle class has not shown itself capable of
developing an original and authentic culture.” [4] Economically, socially,
culturally, the role of the “colonial” bourgeoisie has been largely negative;
at the worst it has been parasitic and destructive.
Where decolonization has been swift, formal power has been
handed over by the metropolitan governments to this group, which has moved into
the administrative field but which wields only the semblance of power. The real
power, and the direction and character of economic development, remains firmly
in the hands of the great overseas monopolies. The interested collaboration of
bourgeois leaders is, however, essential to the re-establishment, the
strengthening, of western exploitation on neocolonial lines; these leaders
spend much of their year travelling [5] and seeking financial aid in exchange
for concessions, while the old pattern of exploitation continues. Colonial
domination had always concentrated capital and development effort in certain
limited and resource-rich areas such as the Central African copper-belt or the
coffee lands of Brazil; these developed and market-oriented economies stood out
as islands in a sea of stagnating peasant production. To reduce the gradients
of wealth and poverty, comprehensive and far-sighted development plans are
essential. Since, however, formal independence brings no change in the economy,
but merely a prolongation of the old predatory practices behind an indigenous
facade, these regional disparities persist, may even widen. [6] The richer
regions are unwilling to place their resources at the disposal of the whole
country; hence regional and tribal separations emerge and these tendencies to
fission can be exploited by those who would divide and rule. [7] The break-up
of the West Indies Federation, the separations of Kasai and Katanga, the
developing separatisms of Kenya and Nigeria, all illustrate that the
bourgeoisie, intent on its own interests, can achieve no real unification of
its country. And this same narrow and self-centred outlook is a formidable
obstacle to the elaboration of those federal or regional groupings of
territories which are essential if the continental-scale poverty of Africa or
Latin America is to be wiped out.
The failure of this bourgeois group to tackle the problems
of development effectively is, meanwhile, hidden behind a facade of “prestige
development” in the capital. Ostentatious but socially irrelevant public works
programmes and a proliferating bureaucracy open up opportunities for many—for
the unskilled labourer and the partly-educated from the rural areas,
desperately seeking the work and food which the underdevelopment of the
countryside denies them; for the petty traders and those with contacts, capital
and a craving to augment this capital rapidly; for the ambitious who see in the
ranks of the ruling party the first rung of the ladder which will take them too
into the magic circle of the élite. City populations spiral dizzily upwards—in
five years the population of Bangkok increases by half a million, that of
Djakarta by a million; Caracas doubles its population in a decade and of its
1.3 million inhabitants some 200–300,000 are unemployed and live in hovels . .
. The gap between city and countryside, between townsman and peasant, between
those who live in ease and ostentation in the new suburbias and those who rot
in the shanty-towns, widens and the social situation becomes increasingly
unstable.
Panis may be lacking but circenses are not and perhaps the
poverty-stricken wretches in the bidonvilles may find distraction from their
misery in the glittering goings-on of the country’s leaders and their wives.
Since the poor are usually also illiterate they can only watch and, perhaps
fortunately, are not able to follow the “humaninterest” stories on the wives of
the great or the foibles of the emergent élite which frequently enliven the
pages of Time. Typical is this write-up of the “African Orchid”, Mme. Thérèse
Houphouet-Boigny, wife of the President of the Ivory Coast, First Lady of an
African state whose per capita income is little over £1 per week:
“No caged bird, but a delicious, capricious worldling, the
Ivory Coast’s sensuous, luxury-loving Marie-Thérèse Houphouet-Boigny, 31,
delights Parisians even more than Jacqueline Kennedy or the Empress Farah . . .
The Ivory Coast’s First Lady is coifed by one of the most exclusive Parisian
hairdressers (Carita), and dressed by Dior, whose salon is strategically
located across the street from the Houphouet-Boignys’ apartment . . . The affluent
Houphouet-Boignys also have a villa in the stylish Swiss resort of Gstaad (her
six-year-old adopted daughter, Helene, is attending school in Switzerland), an
Ivory Coast beach house, an ultramodern five-storey tower in the fashionable
Cocody sector of Abidjan, the Ivory Coast’s capital. Thérèse loves orchids and
sables, pilots a fast Lancia . . . Frenchmen, who call her the Ivory One and
see her as the forerunner of a new Europe-influenced African woman, delight in
her exhuberant, ultrafeminine wit. It did not go unappreciated at a recent
luncheon party at Bobby Kennedy’s house, at which, latching on fast to New
Frontiersmanship, she switched tables after every course. Murmured Thérèse,
raising male expectations: ‘I suppose I’ll be in the swimming pool for
dessert.’” [8]
Perhaps it’s not necessary to add that the Time write-up was
meant to be eminently flattering; that there’s not a breath of criticism of the
immorality—even the ultimate political foolishness— of a ruling group of an
African state whose per capita income is less than £60 per annum flaunting
their wealth in this fashion. [9] As Frantz Fanon observes, a group such as
this is “a bourgeois bourgeoisie, meanly, stupidly, cynically bourgeois . . .
It is necessary to oppose it because it is useless. This bourgeoisie, mediocre
in its gains, in its achievement, in its thought, tends to mask this mediocrity
by prestige achievements at the individual level, by the chrome of American
cars, by Riviera holidays, by weekends in neon-lit nightclubs.” [10] The phase
of dominance by this group is a useless phase, in which no real advance towards
a solution of basic social and economic problems is made; once this group has
been swept away the process of initiating real development can begin, from
zero, and in a different framework.
Following the classical pattern, the political parties in
colonial countries tend to devote much of their effort to winning over the
urban proletariat. This includes the artisans and transport workers, the miners
and dockers, in some territories the petty officials. In many ways an informed
group, it shows itself in two sharply contrasting roles. In certain countries,
its members represent an insignificant proportion of the total population—in
Africa, [11] for example, except in the mining territories, they nowhere make
up more than eight per cent of the total population. They enjoy, moreover, a
relatively favoured position within their own society and, in contrast to the
“classical” proletariat of the West, have everything to lose and nothing to
gain from violent upheaval. In such territories the proletariat tends, like the
bourgeoisie, to be cautious, non-violent and given to compromise in the
struggle for independence. Elsewhere, where the colonial period has been more
protracted and the economic and cultural impact of the West greater, this group
appears more clearly in its traditional role as an agency of change. This is
certainly the case in many countries of Southern Asia and the Middle East; it
is also the case in many of the Latin American countries such as Brazil or
Venezuela. The role of the proletariat is, in general, linked with degree of
urbanization: it is most radical in countries where urbanization has
outstripped the growth of the productive sector of the economy. The significance
of this generalisation becomes apparent when we bear in mind that the mushroom
growth of parasitic capital cities, “macrocephaly”, is increasingly a feature
of the Third World and more especially the African sector of the Third World.
The decay of traditional society, the pace and haphazard
character of city growth and the conditions of labour exploitation in some of
the overseas territories have created a sizeable “lumpen-proletariat”, a mass
of hungry, rootless and detribalised wretches living in the shanty towns and
squatters settlements. These are the people described by Ahmed Mezerna: “the
bands of men, women and children and aged, almost totally naked, whom misery
and fear of death has pushed towards the cities and who, each morning, search
the garbage pails, disputing with dogs and cats the remnants of food, the rags
and the empty tin cans.” [12] Politically trained and organised, these groups
can form “an urban spearhead of the revolution” and in the struggle for
liberation can reassert that human dignity which colonial exploitation
smothered in the filth of the shanty town. The classic example of this is
provided by the Algerian war where the integration of the Casbah, the slum
quarter of Algiers, into the FLN campaign marked the real beginning of the
battle for Algiers. [13] Disregarded or by-passed by the national liberation
movement, this mass of starving and status-less beings may turn for salvation
to what Hodgkin terms the “confessional parties” [14], to the various messianic
movements [15] or may be used as a weapon by the forces of reaction. In the
Congo the anti-Lumumba mobs in Leopoldville were recruited from among the
“lumpen-proletariat”, and the “harkis”, the Algerians used by the French
against their fellow-Algerians, came from the same group. Political work among
the masses, and all sections of the masses, is thus essential if the
colonialist policy of turning class against class and tribe against tribe is to
be defeated.
Behind this urbanized, semi-westernized facade, the Third
World remains a peasant world and, as the events of the last 15 years show, the
peasantry is the truly revolutionary class in colonial countries. Hungry,
exploited, his old social position eroded, the peasant has nothing to lose and
everything to gain from the destruction of the colonial society in which he
exists. He discovers, and discovers rapidly, that violence, and violence alone,
pays off; for him there is no possibility of compromise or of negotiated
agreement. In China and Vietnam, in Cuba, Kenya and Algeria, in Brazil’s
North-east and in the back country of Angola, the peasantry has emerged as the
decisive driving force in revolutionary struggles. In the words of Fidel
Castro: “Because of the subhuman conditions under which it lives (it) constitutes
a potential force which—led by the workers and the revolutionary
intellectuals—has a decisive importance in the struggle for national
liberation.” That the peasantry should be regarded with doubt and suspicion by
the great majority of politicians in the emergent countries arises doubtless in
part from the fear of any drastic or real changes in the structure of society,
and partly from the western-influenced vision of the character of this class.
For in the West peasant society has been shattered by the industrial revolution
and the individual peasant has tended to be anarchic, undisciplined, avid for
gain, and politically reactionary. In colonial areas, by contrast, the
peasantry, more than any other group, has managed to preserve much of the
traditional pattern of values, remaining disciplined, clinging to communal
values, solidarist . . . [16] The recent history of East Asia, the more recent
history of Algeria and Cuba, demonstrate how powerful these peasant qualities
can be if channelled into a revolutionary struggle.
Old Wine in New Bottles
The above remarks give only a very general picture of the
elements which may be involved in the emergence of a country from colonial or
semi-colonial status. The recent history of the countries of the Third World
demonstrates that there is little uniformity in the patterns of emergence. In
some areas, such as the countries of the former French Community (excluding
Mali), power has been successfully transferred to the national bourgeoisie:
violent changes in social, political or economic structures have been averted
for the time being; the metropolitan power and its indigenous partners in the
emergent countries have conspired to create a new, more sophisticated version
of the old colonial pattern. This is the condition described by Nkrumah as
“clientele-sovereignty”; this comes, he explains, from “the practice of
granting a sort of independence by the metropolitan power, with the concealed
intention of making the liberated country a client-state and controlling it effectively
by means other than political ones.” [17] Latin America offers many crude
examples of such client-sovereignty; a more sophisticated and recent example is
the Ivory Coast. As the Economist observes: “In colonial days French West
Africa was ruled through a governor in Dakar and lieutenant-governors in the
other capitals; today the French design seems to be a spread of
influence—commercial, financial, ‘cultural’, and political—through M.
Houphouet-Boigny of Abidjan and Paris.” The translation from the status of a
colony to that of a client-state brings little change in the economy. This
remains largely extractive, often dangerously overspecialised, producing
mineral and agricultural raw materials for the former metropolitan power and
the other industrial countries of the West: 82 per cent of Malaya’s exports
consist of rubber and tin, 78 per cent of Pakistan’s exports of jute and
cotton, 93 per cent of Venezuela’s exports of petroleum, 67 per cent of
Brazil’s exports of coffee, cotton or cocoa . . . Industrialization is bridled,
though there may be some limited development of consumer goods industries and
of assembling plants. More ambitious programmes of industrialization take the
form of the extension of operations of the great overseas monopolies; they are
made possible by the close collaboration of overseas interests and the ruling
bourgeois groups, and are carried through at the expense of national industry.
[18] To take the single example of Brazil, foreign investments between 1955 and
1958 rose to 1,095 million dollars while the outflow of capital over the same
period was 2,020 million dollars—representing a net loss of almost one thousand
million dollars, at the expense of the country’s capital accumulation. [19]
Under these conditions—an expanding population, an
exploitative export-oriented agriculture, a highly localised and dependent
industry with limited employment potential, and an absence of any genuine and
nation-wide development planning—the stagnation of whole areas persists and the
grubbing misery of the rural masses increases, thrown into dangerously sharp
relief by the ostentation of the urban ruling class.
“Brazil, a ‘Christian country’, has land to spare, but there
is not enough land for millions of campesinos. Brazil, a ‘Christian country’,
has inexhaustible resources, but also hundreds of thousands of unemployed.
Brazil, a ‘Christian country’, has landlords that live off the rent from one
hundred,, two hundred, five hundred, one thousand houses, while there are
millions crowded in miserable huts like pigs. Brazil, a ‘Christian country’,
has millionaires that make a 9,000 per cent profit on their capital that
multiplies as fast as the germs of pest, and, like those murderers, coldly kill
those who make possible the miracle of the multiplication. Brazil, a ‘Christian
country’, has the sad privilege of having the highest infantile mortality rate
in Latin America, in spite of the industrialization and the development so much
vaunted during the most foreign-dominated administration in the history of
Brazil.” [20]
Thus Francisco Julião, the Brazilian peasant leader, and his
indictment constitutes the backdrop to the Alliance for Progress (“words,
panaceas, patches, everything to hide the unending plundering of riches”), to
the urban strikes and desperate peasant uprisings of Latin America, to the
widely-separated revolts [21] of that two thirds of mankind whose human dignity
has been so long denied . . . And as the threat of social upheaval assumes
increasingly ominous proportions, as the confused and inarticulate dreams of
the damned become increasingly sharply focussed and emphatic (“esta revolución
es de los humildes, por los humildes y para los humildes”), those challenged,
the ruling group and their party, move progressively to the right and seek to
buttress their position by calling first on outside economic and then
ultimately military, aid. “The dominating classes . . . always resorted to
massacre, invoking the ‘defence’ of society, of order, of the homeland; the
defence of their society of privileged minorities over the exploited majority;
their ‘class order’ which they maintain by blood and iron.” [22] And since,
quite apart from its economic and strategic interests, the Latin American bloc
represents for the USA “a reserve supply of votes in international
organisations”, the maintenance of the present social and political structures
is of vital importance to the maintenance of America’s international position.
The general conditions described above apply to most of the
client-states of the West—to much of Latin America and Africa, to many Middle
Eastern countries, to Pakistan and the SEATO countries of South-east Asia,
increasingly to India. A more detailed analysis would enable us to refine the
generalized picture and to sketch in the some of the variants within the
schema—the Latin American bloc, whose countries have enjoyed five generations
of “independence”, which have not yet achieved any real economic or social
integration as nations, [23] where the techniques of foreign economic
penetration and reduction to client status were first elaborated; the emergent
states of Black Africa, striving to integrate traditional values with the needs
of twentieth century life, rent by tribalism, exposed to new and more subtle
imperialisms; the countries of Southern Asia, struggling with the problems of
increasing demographic pressure and of complex, almost fossil, social
structures, [24] with the warping legacy of old colonialisms and the new
containment programmes of Cold War strategists . . . It is hoped to examine
some aspects of this diversity in a later study.
Land and Bread
In a much smaller group of countries (though containing an
aggregate population of close on 750 million people) the anticolonial or
revolutionary struggle has taken on a more radical form. In these countries the
leaders of the liberation movement have recognised the key role of the
peasantry and based the revolutionary struggle on the countryside. The classic
examples of this are China, North Vietnam and Cuba; in Kenya, Algeria, Angola,
and Egypt the land question played or is playing an important role in the
struggle against colonialism; in Guinea and Cambodia the élites recognized the
fundamental role of the peasantry and have made possible the emergence of
socialist-type societies with strong rural roots. The radical restructuring of
society carried through in some of these countries has been bitterly opposed by
the West. The protracted American opposition to the People’s Government of
China or the North Vietnamese government needs no recapitulation. Even more
clear has been the opposition to the emergence of left-wing governments in
Guinea and Cuba. In Guinea the swift withdrawal of the 4,000 French
administrators, teachers and technicians almost crippled the new state, while
both countries were exposed to every form of economic pressure in an attempt to
break the new regimes. [25] Both survived largely as a result of assistance
from the socialist camp and, in the case of Guinea, from her neighbour Ghana.
Once a radical reorientation of society has been begun, the young state can
survive and start the long slow climb to “economic take-off” only with the help
of such aid as may come from the socialist camp or from a hazardous policy of
non-alignment, or by an unprecedented effort of “human investment”, by a
rigorous austerity, backed up by maximum use of all available labour, in order
to initiate the process of capital accumulation. We may shrink away from the
austerity of People’s China, from the massive mobilization of men and women and
children, but we must in honesty ask ourselves what real alternative existed
for the Chinese? And this problem is going to present itself in other parts of
the Third World, in Southern Asia, in Latin America, above all in the poorer
territories of Black Africa. We in the West may ignore the implications of
China’s experience or that of Cuba—but the sober assessment of the French
agronomist Dumont underlines the relevance of China’s experience to the
solution of some of Black Africa’s problems. And at a more emotive level the
starving peasants of Brazil’s North-east and the land-hungry peons of the Latin
American backlands see in “Fidelisimo” more than a slogan, they see the promose
of land and bread and the red dawn of a fuller life . . . [26]
“Land and bread: what must be done to have land and bread?
This set viewpoint of the people, apparently limited, apparently narrow,
constitutes in fact the most fruitful and efficacious programme for action.”
[27] In the light of the class situation in the countries of the Third World,
it seems probable that the shattering of the neocolonial structures which the
West has so laboriously erected during the last two decades will, when the
moment is ripe, be initiated by a spreading wave of peasant-based revolts. Such
revolts are already under way in South Vietnam and parts of the Latin American
backlands and may in the next five years engulf the whole of Latin America,
[28] parts of the Caribbean, many of the emergent African states (Kenya, the
Rhodesias, Angola for example) and the landlord-dominated countries of Southern
Asia.
And, because these revolts will be desperate uprisings of
the exploited, the pauperized and the despised—“armed with stones, sticks,
machetes, now here, now there, daily occupying lands, digging their hooks into
the soil which is theirs, and defending it with their lives”—because they will
be concerned only with land and bread as their immediate objectives, they may
well be confused and demagogic in their initial stages. [29] But if they retain
their impetus and continue beyond agrarian reform to a radical restructuring of
society (and a comparison of, say, Cuba and Venezuela, or North and South
Vietnam underlines the importance of this “continuing revolution”) we may
expect the countries of the Third World to move increasingly towards a pattern
of peasant-based socialisms. And they will do this, not because of subversion,
or because of the missionary zeal of Cuban or Guinean or Chinese leftists, but
because the solutions these latter countries are finding to the problem of
underdevelopment are more relevant—because more concerned with human values—and
more attractive—because their restructuring of society achieves a quicker
break-through from misery to decency—than the refurbished colonialisms and
outmoded liber alisms [30] which the West is pressing on its client-states. And
just as Christianity, Buddhism or Islam adapted themselves in their spread to a
diversity of national environments, by subtle changes in dogma or ritual so
too, in many parts of the non-Western world distinctive and indigenous variants
of “classical” European socialism are beginning to emerge. These may be almost
aggressively non-Western and while they accept, or at least pay lip-service to,
the basic social and economic concepts of Western socialism, their cultivated
traditionalisms their elaborate symbolisms and obscuring mystiques represent
one facet of the rejection of a narcissistic and self-centred Europe [31] by
the emerging non-Western peoples.
Against this background the half-forgotten ideas of the
early Tartar revolutionary, Sultan Galiev, take on a new relevance.
Sultan Galiev’s Vision
Over 40 years ago there was a Tartar who was a member of the
Communist Party in Russia. His name was Mir Sayit Sultan Galiev and he was born
around 1880. With the help of his friends he created in Russian Central Asia a
Muslim Communist Party. He dwelled in a society all of whose members—feudal
leaders, local bourgeois and peasants—were collectively oppressed by Tsarist
Russia. In such circumstances, he saw little profit in creating an artificial
class war; rather, given the scanty likelihood of cadres emerging from the
ignorant and exploited peasantry, was it essential to enlist in the revolution
all who gave proof of their loyalty irrespective of their class. The socialist
revolution had moreover, to adapt itself to the conditions of Muslim society
and here he saw a mission for the Muslim Bolsheviks of Russia—that of carrying
the message of socialism to the peoples of Asia, and in the process, of
correcting the excessive preoccupation of the Comintern with the West. He
strove to make Kazan a centre of Islamic communism, struggling all the time
against local leftists who, supported by the Russians, sought a struggle with
the bourgeoisie; he strove to replace Russian by Tartar as the administrative
language. His thesis was that the socialist revolution did not automatically
solve the problem of “racial” inequality and that, as far as the minority
groups of Russia were concerned, the Bolshevik revolution meant merely the
replacement of oppression at the hands of the European bourgeoisie by oppression
at the hands of the European proletariat. [33] He was exiled, imprisoned,
released; arrested again in 1928 and sentenced to ten years forced labour; he
finally vanished in 1940.
His legacy? Perhaps his most important contribution to the
development of world socialism was his vision of the emergence in the dependent
countries of a marxist nationalism, committed to a programme of national
independence and socialization. Such a vision could scarcely be translated into
reality during the Stalin era, for during this phase the policies of the
colonial communist parties were subordinated to the global strategy of the
Internationale, and this was based ultimately on the white world. With the rise
of Fidel Castro, Sekou Touré, and Modibo Keita the vision has become reality;
the last decade has seen a growing development of “national marxisms” and
“objective socialisms”. Galiev’s rejection of the mechanistic and unimaginative
idea of the predominance of the proletariat (even if virtually non-existent) in
the revolution has been vindicated in recent revolutionary movements. The
“Colonial Internationale” which he strove for, a grouping of non-Western
peoples united against white domination, takes on shadowy form in the shape of
the Third World, though this shows a wide range of philosophies, from a marxist
to a conservative wing. And if since 1954 the USSR has supported this, and the
neutralist Afro-Asian bourgeoisie, it has done so partly as a means of exerting
pressure on the colonial powers. Certainly it has shown no great revolutionary
ardour as far as the socialization of these emergent nations is concerned.
China offers the sole example of a national marxism triumphing within the
framework of a traditional Communist Party and the Chinese themes of colonial
revolution, distrust of neo-colonialism and even, be it added, of
neo-paternalism within the socialist fold, echo some of the ideas of this
forgotten Tartar revolutionary.
Today, the left-wing regimes of the Third World show a wide
divergence from the monolithic socialism offered for overseas consumption by
earlier Internationales. China has developed her distinctive variant of
socialism, deriving in part from her traditional heritage, [34] in part from
the specific qualities of her social geography. Cambodia has developed a “royal
socialism” or “Khmer socialism” which finds its roots in Buddhism on one hand,
in the past history of the Khmer people on the other and which, since marxism
is supranational, claims to be non-marxist. [35] Even the conservative Senegalese
Senghor can claim that “Negro African society is collectivist or, more exactly,
communal . . . we had already realised socialism before the coming of the
European.” [36] In Guinea, Sekou Touré, attempting to build a socialist state
with the financial and technical assistance of the Soviet bloc and China and on
the principles of “democratic centralism”, has declared “Communism is not the
path for Africa. [37] The class struggle is impossible here because of the
absence of social classes . . . The family is the fundamental base of our
society which rests always on the community basis of village life.” Ghana and
Mali are treading this same road to an African socialism, to a variety of
African socialisms. In Martinique, after Aimé Césaire broke with the French
Communist Party in 1957, the struggle for racial and social emanicipation
assumed the form of a national communism. [38] And in Cuba, and on the American
mainland in British Guiana, yet other types of socialism are emerging and these
will impinge increasingly on the Latin American world.
It is not easy to estimate the viability of these
experiments and, indeed, as the recent history of Cuba indicates, they are
exposed to many quite unpredictable hazards. Cheverny, in his discussion of the
new regimes of Asia, paints a pessimistic picture, [39] stressing the
contradictory elements in programmes designed to protect the populace from the
seductions of communism and at the same time to capture the enthusiasm and
drive of that ideology. This desperate attempt of the leaders to emulate the
Irish of Honor Tracy’s story and “stay on the straight and narrow path between
right and wrong” may go some way towards accounting for the eclectic, often
mystifying, character of some of the Third World ideologies. And the outside
observer of Third World politics is not greatly assisted by the reckless
abandon with which the term “socialist” is used: Venezuela and Senegal have
“socialist” leaders, but are client-states of the West; Phoumi Nosavan, leader
of the Laotian reaction, founded a “social democratic” party; Nepal is
relinquishing the feudal society of the Middle Ages for a “socialising
society”— whatever that may mean; as Cheverny observes “the concept of
socialism covers all manner of wares” . . .
Genuine progress, in the sense of the beginnings of a
breakthrough from stagnating poverty to certain basic levels of human decency,
seems confined to those countries whose governments are “left”, not so much by
their own definition as in the view of the West—People’s China, North Korea and
North Vietnam, Cuba, Guinea, possibly the new Algeria, [40] and more
problematically, British Guiana and Cambodia. If, as seems likely, the
neocolonial grip on so much of the Third World persists or, as may well be,
tightens, then these widely scattered left wing regimes assume an importance
out of all relation to their number, their population or their impoverished
treasuries. They are, in a very real sense, the growing points of a new world.
And if they can demonstrate that their own variants of socialism can achieve an
economic breakthrough and can bring to their peasant masses a richer and fuller
life, the political balance in the Third World will shift decisively to the
left . . . and the Third World, including China, contains, I remind you, almost
two-thirds of humanity . . . They can, perhaps achieve this break-through on
their own, but only at the cost of an immense and painfully protracted mass
mobilization and investment of human effort. The harshness and the suffering of
this transition could be greatly mitigated by massive outside aid. Unless there
is a drastic change in Western policy such aid is not likely to be forthcoming
from the West; as the examples of China, Guatemala, Cuba, Guinea and South
Vietnam show, Western policy has been more concerned with crippling radical
social revolution by economic pressure, or, where possible, by outside military
aid. Under these conditions, aid from the socialist bloc, and this means the
“European” members of the socialist bloc, will be critical. And the extent of
such aid is likely to depend on, firstly, the extent to which cold war
conditions will continue to demand the allocation of funds to improved weaponry
rather than to wiping out hunger in the Third World; secondly, on the extent to
which the working class in the “European” socialist countries is prepared to
postpone the attainment of an “affluent society” in their own countries to
achieve, through a far-reaching policy of aid, at least a minimum level of
well-being in the underdeveloped world. The despairing thesis that the European
proletariat would be as indifferent to the needs of the non-European world as
was the European bourgoisie, has yet to be demonstrated false.
The Soviet Union, the 22nd Congress and the Third World
The diversion of economic resources from preparation for
nuclear warfare to the raising of living levels in the Third World, and
especially in the socialist countries of the Third World, is critical here and
is discussed by many of the spokesmen of this two-thirds of humanity. Fanon,
for example, emphasises that the cold war prevents either of the blocs from
helping the underdeveloped countries on the scale they should. He adds: “These
literally astronomical sums invested in military research, these engineers
transformed into technicians in nuclear warfare could, in 15 years, raise the
level of living in the underdeveloped countries by 60 per cent.” [41] This is
not the place to discuss “the balance of blame” in the headlong Gadarene race
towards nuclear suicide; it has been objectively and dispassionately analysed
by C. Wright Mills. [42] What is clear is that, in the present world context,
the Soviet Union, however strong may be its desire for peace and disarmament,
cannot afford the risk of “going it alone”; in the absence of a genuine
Soviet-American accord it is committed, willy-nilly, to this infernal contest.
But in one very real way the cold war does influence the possibilities and the
pattern of development in the Third World. For, as Pierre Moussa has observed,
“The cold war . . . causes the two blocs to make their greatest effort not
where the need is greatest but on the outskirts of the groups for which they
consider themselves responsible.” [43] This obviously deflects a large volume
of aid to outliers, to peripheral members of either power group at the expense
of the rest of the Third World.
The problem of the relationship between the rapidly-rising
living standards of the “European” socialist countries and the struggle to
achieve some minimum level of decency—in the shape of freedom from
exploitation, from disease and from hunger—in the underdeveloped countries, and
especially those underdeveloped countries with socialist regimes—is perhaps
even more critical. The Soviet Union is beginning to approach the condition of
an “affluent society” and, as Moussa puts it, “tends more and more to appear in
the eyes of other nations as an ‘old rich one’—in other words to suffer the
fate which has dogged the United States for the last 25 years.” [44] This is brought
into sharp focus by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU which envisages an increase
of Soviet national product by 500 per cent in 20 years, and an increase in real
per capita income of 350 per cent over the same period; at the end of these two
decades the Soviet people are to enjoy the highest standard of living in the
world, the shortest working week and the most comprehensive social welfare
services. Paul Baran has commented: “The majestic edifice of plenty projected
at the 22nd Congress has produced mixed reactions in the Chinese and some other
Communist parties struggling desperately to overcome abysmal poverty in their
countries . . . they can hardly fail to experience the strong sense of
estrangement which ‘have nots’ usually develop towards the ‘haves’.” [45]
The whole problem is complexly interwoven with Soviet
internal policies, since under conditions of increasing liberalization and
democratization in the USSR, its leaders cannot suddenly allocate resources and
funds to a vast campaign of aid to the socialist regimes of the Third World
without risking some measure of unpopularity among the Soviet masses who are
emerging from austerity. Yet the risk that glaring inequalities in living
standards between the peoples of the USSR and those of the emergent countries
will introduce new and dangerous rifts within the community of socialist
nations (rendered more dangerous by the fact that the cleavage seems to follow
“racial” lines)—the very real risks that, in the absence of such aid, the
emergent socialist countries will founder or else be pushed to inhuman extremes
of mass mobilization of their labour force to achieve a break-through from
hunger and poverty to the essentials of a decent life, these risks are at least
as great and as ominous in their potential repercussions. For even though the
socialisms of the emergent world are “national”, or “objective” socialisms,
even though they may show deviations in dogma from the “European” socialisms,
if the momentous experiments being carried out in China and Cambodia and Guinea
and Cuba fail, the neo-colonial curtain will fall over the whole of the Third
World. And if a pennywise policy towards the aid of other emergent
revolutionary movements should be followed, or if there should be a deliberate
policy on the part of the USSR of discouraging radical change, because the
emergence of other left wing regimes will mean a yet further drain on the
resources of the older socialisms, the pessimism of Sultan Galiev will be
tragically vindicated.
“Con los pobres de la tierra Quiero yo mi suerte echar,”
Jose Marti
“With the poor of the earth I will cast my lot.” Thus the
19th century Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti—and though this ideal has become a
living force in Cuba’s latest revolution, it embodies a sentiment which has
never greatly troubled either the affluent societies of the West or the left
wing politicians of these societies. Indeed, as Marcel Péju comments acidly,
some sections of the European left seem to wish “to construct a socialism de
luxe with the fruits of imperialist rapine.” [46]
We have drawn attention above to the “crisis of conscience”
which will face the socialist countries as they move increasingly towards a
condition of affluence. This same moral problem has confronted the wealthy
nations of the West for at least a generation; they have either ignored it or
salved their consciences and purchased yet a little more time with much
publicized but minuscule aid schemes—the United Kingdom’s assistance to the
underdeveloped world thus amounted to precisely 0.71 per cent of her gross
national income in 1958. And this absence of any really effective aid cannot be
laid solely at the door of the great monopolies or a greedy group of
capitalists; the working class has forced up its standard of living in very large
measure at the expense of fellow-workers in the colonial world and, in the
opinion of Moussa, these efforts of Western workers to raise their standards of
living have contributed more to the deterioration of the position of the
underdeveloped countries than has the profit motive of industrial or commercial
leaders. [47] Having tasted the delights of affluence, European workers have
tended to become “embourgoisé” and ever more Europo-centric and parochial in
their attitudes. A Fanon may cry that the well-being and progress of Europe
have been built with the sweat and corpses of black man and yellow man, Indian
and Arab—but the cry is unheard amid the distractions of a new and delightful
opulence.
The record of the political leaders of the left in Europe has
been as my teenage daughters would put it, “pretty crumby”; this record, seen
in a context of world socialism, has been one of defection and treason, of
resounding phrases and empty gestures. Preoccupied with the redistribution of
wealth within their own countries (with “the sharing of the booty” as Péju puts
it) they have consented to a token embellishment of the ghettoes of the Third
World, but have never dreamed of showing their solidarity with the workers who
live in these ghettoes by formulating measures to redistribute wealth on a
global scale. Since many of us believe that one of the main forces behind
socialism is its morality and its human decency, it may well be that much of
the impotence of the left in Europe today derives from the neglect of these
primary virtues, from the bankruptcy of its ideas and its leaders when
confronted with the problems of a global socialism. Equally, it may well be
that a courageous confrontation of the political and moral issues posed by the
Third World—a real rejection of and active opposition to all forms of economic
and political domination, the formulation and adoption of a massive policy of
genuine redistribution of wealth between the affluent nations and the
proletarian nations—it may be that such a confrontation will restore to the
left the drive and idealism which it possessed when confronted with these
problems at a national level.
To the newly-affluent nations of the socialist bloc and to
the left of the old rich countries, the Third World poses the same question—
where, in Marti’s phrase, will you cast your lot? On the answer to this
question is going to depend not only the future shape of the Third World and
the qualify of life of its people, but also the future of socialism in our
time.
[1] Sartre, J. P., Preface to Les damnés de la terre, by
Frantz Fanon (Paris, 1961), p. 9.
[2] Guevara, Ché, Guerilla Warfare, trans. J. P. Morray (New
York, 1961), p. 119. Seel also Lambilliotte, M., “Avec ou contre l’histoire”,
Synthèses (Brussels), March 1961, pp. 9–10.
[3] Fanon, Frantz, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961). See
also the same writer’s Peau noire, masques blancs.
[4] Guérin, D., The West Indies and Their Future (London,
1961), Chapter XI.
[5] “The President . . . is abroad half the year, mostly in
France. Perhaps one of his ministers could help? The one required is likely to
be on a trip seeking decisions from the absent President . . .” Thus the
Economist, 18th August, 1962, of conditions in the Ivory Coast.
[6] A recent geographical study of Salvador illustrates in
striking fashion the way in which a country’s economy can be warped by
unplanned and profit-hungry investment in both agriculture and industry:
Tricart, Jean, “A propos du cas Salvador: le geographe et le développement
economique et social” in Développement et Civilisations (Paris), April—June,
1962, pp. 80—93.
[7] See “Majimbo for All” Economist, 18th August, 1962, p.
598, for the reactions of the Kenya Europeans to the regionalist opposition to
KANU.
[8] Time, 8th June, 1962, p. 35.
[9] What is even more incredible is that a French-educated
group should behave thus, forgetting how important a role the glaring gap
between the rich and the poor played in the French Revolution . . . See, for
example, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.
[10] Fanon, F., op. cit., pp. 114, 132.
[11] See table in Hodgkin, T., Nationalism in Colonial
Africa (London, 1956), p. 118. According to Hodgkin’s data trade union members
make up a negligible negligible proportion of the workers in many territories.
[12] Quoted by Joan Gillespie, Algeria: Rebellion and
Revolution (London, 1960), p. 69.
[13] Gillespie, op. cit., p. 146. Behr, E., The Algerian
Problem (Penguin Books, 1961), p. 112, refers to the incorporation into the
struggle of the “welders and dockers . . . the pimps and petty racketeers.”
[14] Hodgkin, T., African Political Parties (Penguin Books,
1961), p. 67.
[15] e.g. The Ras Tafari Movement in Jamaica, see Ruth
Glass, “Ashes of Discontent: The Past and Present in Jamaica”, in Monthly
Review (New York) May, 1962, and esp. pp. 27–29.
[16] Though limited land reform, as in Venezuela, or
modifications of the traditional patterns of tenure as in the Kingdom of
Buganda, may result in conservative peasantries.
[17] Nkrumah, Kwame, I Speak of Freedom (New York, 1961), p.
265.
[18] The latter, owning to lack of planning, is inefficient
and wasteful in terms of both labour and capital; its products, moreover, are
regarded by the wealthy as inferior to the imported product, and can scarcely
be absorbed by other groups owing to lack of purchasing power. Friedmann, G.,
Problèmes d’Amérique Latine (Paris, 1959), pp. 27–8. Josué de Castro comments
on “the connivance between government and monopolies to ruin the real interests
of the nation.” “Les visages de la faim en Amérique Latine,” Développement et
Civilisations, July-Sept. 1961, p. 31.
[19] Montaigu, G., “Les causes profondes de
sous-développement” in Recherches Africaines (INRD, Conakry), April-June, 1961,
p. 9. The Ivory Coast had a capital inflow of £14 million in 1961; £28 million
were repatriated as profits. Segal, R., African Profiles (Penguin Books, 1962),
p. 248.
[20] Julião, Francisco, “Brazil, a Christian Country” in
Monthly Review (New York) Sept., 1962, p. 249. Jean Tricart documents this
increasing gap between rich and poor between countryside and city, and adds “It
is creating a pro-revolutionary situation whose evolution could be very swift,
as the case of Cuba shows.” See “Un Exemple du deséquilibre villes-campagnes
dans une economie en voie de developpement: le Salvador” in Développement of
Civilisations, July-Sept., 1962, p. 102.
[21] “These do not appear to be the manifestations of the
growing pains of industrialism, though there is an element of this too; rather
they seem to be the symptoms of a grave social disease, with the dispossessed
and vengeful millions swarming at the vortex of every disorder.” A Travelling
Observer, “The Coming Latin American Revolution” in Monthly Review (New York),
March, 1962, p. 508.
[22] Second Declaration of Havana.
[23] de Castro (op. cit p. 31) refers to “the monstrous
duality of structure, with an industrial economy, often highly developed,
superimposed on a precapitalist agricultural system.” This same lack of
integration is illustrated by the 32 million Indians who remain geographically,
socially and politically marginal to the life of the countries of which they are
citizens: “Hounded into the depths of America across the Paraguayan plains and
the Bolivian plateaux, sad, melancholy races resorting to alcohol and narcotics
in order to manage to survive under the subhuman conditions in which they
live.” Second Declaration of Havana. See also Ciro Alegria’s great novel Broad
and Alien is the World, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York, 1941).
[24] André Gorz emphasises the role played by the United
States in the maintenance of these outmoded structures: “Gaullisme et néo-colonialisme”
in Lex Temps Modernes, March, 1961, p. 1161. In Iran, Western diplomacy “has
chosen to lean on the worst aspects of economic liberalism in its fight against
subversion, it has based its action on the feudal class; doing this, it has
moved much closer to the critical explosion point.” Simonet, Pierre A.,
“Feudalisme et liberalisme economique en Iran” in Développement of
Civilisations, July-Sept., 1962, p. 54.
[25] For a short account of the attempts to isolate Guinea
see Chronique de Politique Etrangère (Brussels), Jan.-May, 1961, pp. 268–70.
[26] See for example René Dumont’s remarks on this topic in
his programmes for agricultural development in Guinea and Mali; Afrique Noire:
Developpement Agricole (Paris, 1961), pp. 32, 34, 172 and esp. 176–7, 209. And
on the whole problem of rural development the same writer’s Terres Vivantes
(Paris, 1961); the final sections of this volume are especially relevant.
[27] Fanon, F., op. cit. p. 39.
[28] Julião, F., op. cit. The Mexican press reported
(mid-1962) that guerilla warfare was spreading in Guatemala, Colombia,
Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay.
[29] Thus, speaking of the type of democracy needed in
Brazil, Julião says: “The name matters very little, as long as it is for the
people. Let it be called Christian, popular, or socialist, as long as it brings
as its first step a radical agrarian reform.”
[30] See Mende, Tibor, South-East Asia Between Two Worlds
(London, 1955), pp. 278–81.
[31] Expressed most forthrightly by Fanon, op. cit, pp.
239–42.
[32] This account of Sultan Galiev’s views is based on
Maxine Rodinson’s valuable study “Communisme et Tiers Monde: Sur un précurseur
oublié” in Les Temps Modernes, Jan., 1961, pp. 853–64.
[33] Not borne out by internal developments in the USSR but
of some validity on a global scale. Cf. Senghor’s observation: “The European
proletariat has profited from the colonial system; therefore, it has never
really—I mean, effectively—opposed it.” Senghor, L. S., African Socialism (New
York, 1959), p. 19. On this topic see Cheverny, Julien, Eloge du colonialisme
(Paris, 1961), and especially pp. 280–1.
[34] See Needham, J., “The Past in China’s Present” in The
Centennial Review, Vol. IV, Nos. 2 and 3 (1960).
[35] See Considérations sur le socialisme Khmer (Phnom Penh,
1961) and Buchanan, K., “Buddha, Marx and Sihanouk” in Pacific Viewpoint
(Wellington) Vol. III, No. 2 (1962), pp. 105–8.
[36] Senghor, ibid, p. 32. See also Dia, M., The African
Nations and World Solidarity (New York, 1961).
[37] Chronique de Politique Etrangère, Jan.-May, 1961, p.
247.
[38] Guérin, D., op. cit., p. 115.
[39] Cheverny, Julien, op. cit. and esp. Chapter 1 “Césars
d’Asie, Idées d’ailleurs.”
[40] Which may hold great promise owing to the experience
gained by the FLN in the social and economic organisation of the guerilla-held
areas. This parallels, though with a shorter duration, the Chinese experience
in the Communist-held Border Areas; it is described by Fanon, op. cit.
[41] Fanon, op. cit., p. 61. Given existing living levels
(over most of South Asia incomes are under $100 per capita annually) this will
still leave most of those countries in abysmal poverty and, since income levels
may well rise at a faster rate among the affluent nations, the gap between them
and the proletarian nations will widen.
[42] Mills, C. Wright, “Causes of World War III”(London,
1959) and The Balance of Blame (Reprinted from The Nation by American Friends
Service Committee, 1960).
[43] Moussa, P., The Underprivileged Nations (London, 1962),
p. 184.
[44] Moussa, op. cit., p. 181.
[45] Baran, P., “The Great Debate” in Monthly Review, May,
1962, p. 40. Compare this increase of 350 per cent in 20 years with Fanon’s
figure for the underdeveloped nations of 60 per cent in 15 years.
[46] Péju, M., “Mourir pour de Gaulle?” in Les Temps
Modernes, Oct.-Nov., 1960, p. 499.
[47] Moussa, P., op. cit., pp. 6—7.
