Third-Worldism and Socialism – Cajo Brendel

[We publish here this English translation of an article from Cajo Brendel, Dutch communist revolutionary and former member of the GIKH and Communistenbond Spartacus. Translated from a French version found here.]

In the two decades following the 2nd World War, the political scene was dominated by the anti-imperialist struggles of colonised peoples. The Chinese revolution is only the most important case of a colonial people engaged in very hard fighting against a much more powerful imperialist enemy—Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam are also examples.

While these anti-imperialist struggles raged on, the metropolitan working class fought few politically significant battles against its own masters; in none of the industrialised countries did the proletariat rise up against the bourgeoisie to challenge its political power. The 1956 Hungarian uprising, like the 1921 Kronstadt uprising in Russia (1), was politically important, but since it took place in a country where private ownership of the means of production had already been abolished, it did not fit into the ‘orthodox’ Marxist analysis of social dynamics, and its profound significance remained unknown. It was in these circumstances that “Third-Worldist” theories emerged.

These theories focused mainly on the following points:

1. The proletariat of the industrialised countries does not revolt because it is satiated by the crumbs from the plunder of the colonial world. This fact stifles their revolutionary initiative. The proletariat of these countries is corrupt and integrated into the bourgeois order.
2. The population of the colonial countries, whose labour provides the raw materials necessary for imperialism, constitutes a “world proletariat” (even if they are peasants, who are not involved in industrial activity). On a world scale, they are the revolutionary class. And it is they who have risen up in armed revolt against imperialism. The anti-colonial revolution is therefore the socialist revolution of our time.
3. Peasants the world over will engage in armed struggle and encircle the urban centres (as in China and Cuba). What’s more, these centres will collapse in an economic crisis (having been deprived of sources of raw materials, markets and labour). At this stage, the urban proletariat will join the victorious revolution of the colonial peasants.

The above three points, perhaps simplified to some extent, represent what we mean by the theory of “Third-Worldism”. Like any other orthodoxy, it has many variants, each of which claims to be the only authentic one. In any case, these three points constitute the common denominator of those who adhere to the “Third-Worldist” ideology.

Third-Worldist “Marxism” ignores the fundamental assumptions of the Marxist analysis of society. According to Marx, a revolution is not just a revolt against misery. It is the legitimisation of a new set of social relations, which emerged before the revolution as a result of a new technology of production. According to Marx, it is not the revolution that produces a new society, but a new set of social relations that produces a revolution and then allows it to develop. Thus, the great revolutions in England (1640) and France (1789) could only legitimise the social order that the bourgeoisie had engendered for decades.

What kind of society matured in the colonial countries before their independence? The industrial proletariat in these countries was almost non-existent and could not play any decisive role. The struggle of the colonial peoples was above all a peasant revolt. Revolutions led by semi-military parties, achieved through armed struggles, produced regimes deeply marked by those origins. The new political structures reflect the forms of the struggle for power: regimented, authoritarian, doctrinaire, bureaucratic. New regimes of this kind cannot inspire the millions of people who live in modern, industrialised countries. Every revolution in an underdeveloped country has produced the absolute domination of a political or military bureaucracy. Even if they are tolerated by their own populations (often after the imprisonment or execution of all opposition, including the left), these regimes cannot serve as a model or a goal for the population of a modern industrial society.

This is not to say that these revolutions were without value. Where thousands of people are starving to death, it is irrelevant to complain about the lack of democracy. Even if the Chinese, Cuban or Algerian revolutions had done nothing more than reduce the misery reigning in these colonial countries, they would not have been useless. In fact, they did more than fill hungry bellies: they eliminated illiteracy, abolished private ownership of land, began industrialisation, and so on. But none of this can be considered, either implicitly or explicitly, as having anything whatsoever to do with socialism, since the advanced countries have achieved much more than this, and we still criticise them mercilessly. Socialism is about a fundamental change in the relations of production: the abolition of the relations of domination in material production and in all aspects of social life. The revolts of the Third World do not produce a new kind of social order that is valid for industrial society.

Moreover, the margin of national political autonomy in such states is often very limited. Economic and military aid, omnipresent “advisers”, the legacy of particular political structures and established patterns of trade, tend to leave such states in a situation of dependence on their former imperialist masters: see Algeria’s relations with France. Where the revolt has gone deeper, new political structures and trade flows are created, and generally the country finds itself increasingly subject to the influence of other superpowers. Cuban support for the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia showed the extent to which Castro depended on the Russians buying up Cuban sugar—the trade of principles being directly related to the principle of trade. Even when real “political” independence is achieved, as in the case of China, principles are sacrificed for the benefits of trade. In 1964, the Japanese Maoist CP sabotaged a general strike in connection with its efforts to promote Sino-Japanese trade, and two years later it was revealed that the Chinese were supplying the USA with the flat and round steels that were essential to its war effort in Vietnam.

Even if the “economic catastrophe” of the metropolitan centres does not materialise—as anyone slightly familiar with the primacy of the internal market in modern capitalism could easily have predicted—the industrialised countries are less dependent on the underdeveloped countries than the latter are on the former. Not only can artificial fibres replace cotton, but the cotton-producing countries represent very poor markets for cars and computers, for example. The modern industrialised countries are less and less dependent on their former colonies, both for raw materials and for markets, compared with the past. Holland lost Indonesia, Belgium lost the Congo, and the USA was thrown out of Cuba without its economy collapsing.

However, the struggles of the colonial peoples did contribute something to the revolutionary movement. The fact that poorly armed peasant populations were able to confront the enormous forces of modern imperialism shook the myth of the invincibility of Western military, technological and scientific power. Their struggle also revealed to millions the brutality and racism of capitalism and led many people, especially young people and students, to take up the struggle against their own regimes. But support for the colonial peoples against imperialism does not imply support for any of the organisations involved in the struggle.

Our refusal to support political organisations with nationalist, bourgeois or state-capitalist agendas is not only a question of fidelity to revolutionary, moral and ideological principles. It is also a question of political solidarity. In many cases, among the larger, richer and more influential organisations, there are small groups of militant internationalist revolutionaries who stand in sharp conflict not only with imperialism, but also with their own nationalist “partners”. In China, for example, both anarchists and Trotskyists were crushed on the CP’s road to victory. Advocates of “realism” who give their support more on the basis of size than on the basis of programme, on the basis of objective conditions rather than subjective consciousness, are betraying not only their revolutionary principles, but also those who are fighting for the same principles in the countries in question. It is the politics of those who adapt to “objective conditions” rather than those who dare to challenge and transform them.

Cajo Brendel

Notes

(1) See Andy Anderson’s Hungary, 1956; and Ida Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt, Crépuscule sanglant des Soviets, Cahiers Spartacus.