Marx and Lenin in Africa and Asia

Socialism(s) and Socialist Legacies

Harry Verhoeven, Harry Verhoeven

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000487107
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Politics

The spectres of Marx and Lenin have long loomed prominently in Africa and Asia and they still do so in the 21st century. Many of the founding fathers of postcolonial republics believed socialism could transform their societies. Yet what socialism meant in theory and in practice has always been highly heterogeneous and differed markedly from the European experience. African and Asian movements did not simply mimic the ideas and institutions of Soviet or European Marxists, but endeavoured to define their own, experimenting with a variety of interpretations and in the process adapting doctrines and templates to their unique contexts.

This volume brings together anthropologists, historians and political scientists from around the world to reflect on three great challenges which various types of socialists in Africa and Asia have had to simultaneously contend with in their articulations of liberation: how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in an international order not of their making.

In a post-colonial world, this helps centre a key question running through the different chapters: what can African and Asian imaginaries, institutions and practices tell us about socialism as a global phenomenon?

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

“What is to be done?” Rethinking socialism(s) and socialist legacies in a postcolonial world

Harry Verhoeven

ABSTRACT

Throughout the twentieth century, the ideas of Marx and Lenin were fervently listened to, adopted, modified and confronted in Africa and Asia – an ideational and organisational reservoir still of foremost importance today, as this volume demonstrates. What socialism has meant, and still means, in theory and in practice has always been highly heterogeneous. African and Asian movements have not simply mimicked the blueprints and dogmas of Soviet or European Marxists, but have built and contextualised their own: the postcolonial metamorphosis of class and regional order; the appropriate role – if any – of religion, culture and nationalism in their societies; the organisation of political institutions and economic control mechanisms after 1989, etc. Above all, what has set socialists in African and Asian societies apart from their comrades in Europe have been three great challenges they have had to simultaneously contend with in their articulations of liberation: how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in a world order not of their making. In a postcolonial world, this then begs a key question: what can African and Asian imaginaries, institutions and practices tell us about socialism as a global phenomenon?

Introduction

At the time of authoring this collection, the world was commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the wall that had physically and politically divided Berlin, Europe and international society as a whole. The thousands of Ossis who reunited across the border with thousands of Wessis accelerated already ongoing processes that were dissolving the Warsaw Pact and one-party communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The year 1989 seemed to signal the imminent burial of Marx and Lenin in the European heartlands where their teachings had first revolutionised politics. Few doubted other parts of the world would follow soon, as Soviet and Cuban troops withdrew from Afghanistan and Angola, socialist autocracies in Benin, Congo-Brazzaville and Zambia disintegrated, the Sandinistas lost power in Nicaragua and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen joined North Yemen to form the non-Marxist Republic of Yemen. The end of the Cold War appeared coterminous with the end of socialism to many, and with the end of history to some.

Yet, as has become increasingly clear in recent years, such conclusions reflected a very partial reading of the meaning of 1989. During that same year, student-led protests demanding political liberalisation were mercilessly repressed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square from the evening of 3 June onwards. The carnage entrenched the dominance of what is now widely regarded as the world’s most powerful political machine – the Chinese Communist Party – and its tried and tested recipes of Leninist democratic centralism.¹ In Venezuela, riotous protests against neoliberal reforms were met with extrajudicial violence during the 1989 Caracazo in which more than 2000 people died, leading to the discrediting of oligarchic democracy and the rise of the Bolivarian socialist movement, with its helmsman, Hugo Chavez, calling it ‘the defining moment of his life’.² Moreover, the unwinding of the Cold War deprived socialist-leaning governments of Soviet financial and military assistance, but it also led Western states to stop protecting erstwhile allies – Apartheid South Africa, Mobutu’s Zaire, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea – leaving these in penury and isolation and fatally destabilising their grip on authority. Especially on the African continent, this had far-reaching consequences. Two formidable (anti-Soviet) Marxist–Leninist movements, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), readied to capture Addis Ababa and would, from 1991 onwards, begin to rule Ethiopia and soon-to-secede Eritrea. In Central and Southern Africa, the withdrawal of Cold War assistance opened the door for the surge of Pan-Africanist and socialist inspired (neo-)liberation movements, which after 1986 won civil wars and/or seized total control of the state in Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa, joining the ranks of comrade governments in Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.³ From Asmara on the Red Sea to Luanda on the Atlantic, self-declared progressive governments no longer explicitly used all the vocabulary of Marx and Engels, given the shadow of American unipolar dominance, but nonetheless continued to see much of national and international politics through an African socialist lens.

These divergent trajectories of socialism(s) – before 1989 as well as after the Fall of the Berlin Wall – in the Western-dominated core of the international system and postcolonial Africa and Asia are at the heart of this collection. Westad rightly emphasises the underestimated centrality of the intersections between the Cold War and decolonisation and the ways in which they shaped each other:

The Cold War is still generally assumed to have been a contest between two superpowers over military power and strategic control, mostly centred on Europe. [However,] the most important aspects of the Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but connected to political and social development in the Third World.⁴

In other words, what was and is at stake in revisiting socialist legacies is much more than questions of geopolitical alignment. From Nehru in India to Nyerere in Tanzania, the founding fathers of new republics believed socialism could transform their societies following the retreat of European colonialism. Yet what socialism meant and still means in theory and in practice in Africa and Asia has always been highly heterogeneous and differed markedly from the European experience (itself very diverse too). African and Asian movements have not simply mimicked the ideas and institutions of Soviet or European Marxists, but have endeavoured to define their own in a postcolonial setting, experimenting with a variety of interpretations and in the process adapting doctrines and templates to their unique political and social contexts.⁵ Socialists of various stripes across Africa and Asia have debated and tested the metamorphosis of class divisions and regional order; the organisation of political institutions and state structures (multinational federalism, a unitary state or a regional federation with their neighbours?); the appropriate role – if any – of religion, culture and nationalism in their societies; and much more. Above all, what has set (self-declared) socialists in African and Asian societies apart from their comrades in Europe and the Soviet Union have been three great challenges they had to simultaneously contend with in their respective articulations of liberation: how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in a world order that is not of their making but has heavily influenced the conditions for their entry and manoeuvrability in the international system.

Socialist ideas and the study of Africa and Asia

The vast, multi-disciplinary literature on socialism and communism spans many states, societies and movements.⁶ However, it is predominantly focussed on twentieth-century Europe and, notable exceptions notwithstanding, the US–Soviet confrontation has provided the chief entry point through which observers have approached socialist parties, writings, personalities, policies and regimes in Africa and Asia. Most of the scholarship on the topic was produced during the Cold War and, as Askew notes, ‘abounds with classification schemes delineating the features, merits, and internal contradictions of socialism/communism … measuring them against each other and “scientific socialism” as articulated in the Soviet sphere’.⁷ Much of this literature inevitably finds African and (to a lesser extent) Asian socialisms under-theorised, skewedly implemented or otherwise wanting,⁸ leading some to reject any usefulness of viewing Third World states through a ‘socialist’ lens.⁹ An exemplar of this scepticism is Rubin’s dissection of Afghan communism:

The PDPA [People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan] articulated criticisms using poorly understood Marxist terminology. The Marxism was skimpy, mainly limited to what could be gleaned from translations of a few Marxist classics published by the Iranian Tudeh Party. More important than Marxism as a theory of social change was the role played by the neighboring Soviet Union in supporting the Afghan state and offering to export its versions of modernization. The PDPA’s analysis of Afghanistan, as set forth in its ‘platform’, was a more or less canned Soviet-line analysis that could just as well (or ill) have been applied to any one of dozens of postcolonial countries.¹⁰

As Rubin postulates, ‘Afghan’ could be replaced by ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Senegalese’ or ‘Tunisian’ and the same diagnosis would still apply in study after study of African and Asian socialism. In such critiques, empty socialist rhetoric served the principal purpose of obtaining funds from Moscow (and, after the Sino–Soviet schism, Maoist Beijing). It obfuscated the real drivers of politics – ethnicity, fundamentalism and greedy elites battling it out – that reasserted themselves in full force after the collapse of what turned out to be Potemkin regimes.

This volume counters that such a sweeping conclusion is at once factually incorrect and intellectually unproductive. While emphasising the external imperatives for embracing Marxist language and the shallowness of the domestic sources of socialism may or may not have been correct in the specific case of Afghanistan¹¹ (or Benin,¹² Burma¹³ or Congo-Brazzaville¹⁴), the net result is that the study of various forms of radical left-wing ideo...