Once again on the centrality of anti-imperialism in the fight for socialism
The original version (in Spanish) of this note dates back to the late 1990s, when I was seeking to clarify my own thoughts on the issues involved in it. In October 2022, I translated it and edited it lightly. I do not claim originality. Similar ideas have been better articulated by others. Still, I hope this helps.
The most important event in human history in this last century, the one involving substantial, concrete, palpable progress for the largest mass of humanity, is proof of the resounding success of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. I refer, of course, to China’s rapid industrialization, virtual eradication of preexisting extreme poverty and the consequent transformation of the living and working conditions of tens of millions of people, in forty-odd years, made possible by the 1949 revolution.
Although Marx, in his correspondence with Vera Zasulich (1881), had already distanced himself from such a conception, it was not until towards the end of the First World War that it became clear what Lenin had glimpsed in 1905 (and perhaps Karl Kautsky before him); that human history was not going to have first at its center a proletarian revolution in the West — Europe and its transoceanic offshoots, especially in North America.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the “Asian” peoples (and here one must include those of Latin America, Africa, etc.), whom colonial brutality had apparently reduced to the periphery of world history, began to rise up. The anti-colonial struggles in Persia, Turkey, China, and India which broke out at about the same time as the Russian revolution of 1905 (and then Mexico in 1910), made it evident that the “East” or — as now leftists say — the “South” (an area of the world inhabited by the overwhelming majority of the world’s population) was the real eye of the world revolutionary storm.
These facts of universal historical importance were not anticipated by any Marxist tradition, neither European nor Russian. That is why Lenin’s effort, towards the end of his life, to generalize theoretically and strategically this new situation has enormous merit.
In a way, the Russian revolution of October 1917 was the first anti-imperialist revolution. It occurred in a predominantly precapitalist country on the periphery of the Western capitalist world. Although the Marxists (Lenin in particular) came of age theoretically and politically by rejecting the ideas of populists and liberals, exaggerating in their allegations the level of capitalist development in the Russian countryside at the beginning of the century (to attribute to the incipient industrial working class the role of vanguard in the struggle against autocracy), already in 1921 — with the NEP — they had to backpedal and recognize that the problem in front of them was precisely that of the lack of development of the productive force of labor — productive not of any type of wealth, but specifically productive of the wealth that could lead to reproducing a robust communal, cooperative society.
The Bolsheviks placed themselves at the head of an enormous and enormously backward country, with a feudal or semi-feudal or “Asian” socioeconomic structure. The immediate task facing the Soviet state was the rapid industrialization of Russia. As things looked toward the end of Lenin’s life, and if for no other reason to defend itself against imperialist encirclement, the struggle for socialism would have to go through stages and could only become viable after such industrialization (on a par with the industrial development of Germany, the United States or England) had been achieved.
When, at the beginning of the 20th century, the sleeping giants of the East and South began to awaken, the perspective of the struggle for socialism had to be rethought. As far as we know, Lenin was among the most lucid and insistent in drawing conclusions from the new situation. Even if the German revolution had triumphed, in the conflict between “the world countryside and the world city”, humanity was going to need the Asian masses as the protagonist of the fight against the toxic colonial legacy.
Gramsci wrote that the Russian revolution had been, in essence, a revolution against Capital (Marx’s work). Indeed, the strategy of the Third International in its first stage (upon its 2nd Congress in the summer of 1920), at the behest of Lenin, was a drastic break with the classical Marxist tradition.
Marxists had conceived universal history as the history that gave rise to European modernity. Now it was necessary to widen the scope and assimilate a much more diverse social dynamic in vast areas of the world where the institutions of “classical” European capitalism had never taken hold (except in “distorted” form, in the enclaves of colonial plunder).
Regarding India, Marx wrote that “when a great social revolution assimilates the results of the bourgeois epoch, the world market and the powers of modern production, and has brought them under the common control of the more advanced peoples, only then will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol that drinks nectar from the skulls of its victims.” According to Marx, revolution in the advanced West was what could give a predominantly rural Russia the opportunity for a vast social reorganization in the manner of the “Chinese communes of today.”
For Marx, with the support of the industrialized socialist countries of the West, the traditional rural communities of Russia would be able to participate in social progress in Russia. Subsequently, Engels basically confirmed Marx’s approach, although testifying to an almost irreversible degradation of traditional Russian structures. In any case, Russia’s emancipation was going to require that the native population “assimilate the intellectual and material fruits of capitalist development.”
But with the Russian revolution and, even more so with the Chinese revolution, a large part of the world population moved towards other paths of historical progress (contradictory, as all historical progress has been until today), paths that cannot be assimilated to the classical Marxist scheme. The proletarian revolution did not triumph in the West. Today, the modalities in which the classical Marxists anticipated such a revolution could not be more improbable. For the character of a revolution, its social basis and its prospects, do not depend so much on what its leaders have in mind. The problems that are addressed (and how much or how little they can be solved) are those that the specific conditions in each context pose.
It is likely that the revolutions in Russia, China, the old Indochina, the Balkans, Cuba, etc., despite their relative deterioration (if not exhaustion) and even (in some cases) downfall, have achieved more for the general progress of humanity than any classical proletarian revolutions in the “advanced” West could ever have achieved.
Marxism took another path, stepping outside the European (inclusive of Europe’s trans-oceanic settler offshoots) framework. Today, in its apparent poverty and diminished influence, Marxism is far more diverse and fecund than it ever was before. For it has never been about preserving the “purity” of any dogma, to maintain any intellectual monopoly in the service of any factual power. Only through its diversification and adaptation to the conditions of each concrete struggle could Marxism persist in a world that became more complex partly as a result of the practical influence of Marxism itself. What is really important is not the code, but the concrete historical process. This is why Gramsci was right to celebrate Lenin’s revisionism.
Again, among the Marxist leaders of the time, Lenin was the one who best understood the revolutionary perspectives of the Asian peoples and, in general, of the non-European world, a world in which — again — European-style capitalist development was the exception. In 1908, Lenin noted that European policies of abuse and plunder would eventually harden the peoples of Asia, prepare them for their future victory. The allies of the Russian revolution were not only the proletarians of Western Europe, but also the rebellious peoples of Asia. In 1913, Lenin spoke (“Backward Europe and Advanced Asia”) of the “awakening of Asia” as a process opening a new era in human history, a process of parallel importance to the struggle of the “advanced” proletariat for power in Europe. Lenin was still waiting for the triumph of the proletariat in Western Europe, but the peoples of Asia were to take on an ever greater strategic importance in his conception.
With the triumph of the Russian revolution and the failure of the revolutions in western Russia, “the awakening of Asia” occupied more space in Lenin’s political bandwidth. At the end of 1919, Lenin met with representatives of communist organizations of the countries of the “East”. There he said that the struggle for socialism was to be “neither solely nor primarily the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat of each country against its bourgeoisie” but above all “the struggle of all colonies and countries dependent on and oppressed by imperialism against international imperialism.” The program of Russian communism was now the fusion of civil war in the advanced countries with the wars of national liberation in the “backward” countries.
In March 1923, a few months before his death, Lenin wrote (“Better little but good”): “the outcome of our struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc. represent the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe”. The basic and central contradiction of the era inaugurated by the October revolution was: “To ensure our existence until the coming military conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between the most civilized countries of the world and the oriental backward countries which, nevertheless, include the majority, a majority that needs civilization”. How were they to get civilized, if not by paths they would have to discover for themselves?
“We too lack the civilization to be able to go directly to socialism, even if we have the political prerequisites for it.” “If a given level of culture is required to build socialism … why not begin to achieve this prerequisite in a revolutionary way and then, with the help of the workers’ and peasants’ government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?” he asked.
With hindsight, the revolutions that took place in other countries of the “East” (China and Vietnam, mainly), countries with large populations and a diversity of social conditions, resulted in a greater historical diversification than was achieved in the Soviet Union, including the countries of Eastern Europe. In 1949, the Chinese revolution was the revolution of almost a quarter of the living human race.
Marx never fully addressed the problem of how non-European peoples were to appropriate the gains of modern civilization and culture. It seems that Marx had no clear idea of the material gap that was going to open up by the middle of the 20th century or even today in the first quarter of the 21st century. (Marx had written in 1867 that the industrially advanced countries projected the future of the more backward ones). Just as the basis of capitalism, in addition to generalized mercantile production, is a polarized distribution of productive wealth, the ultimate basis of imperialism is not spiritual culture but material inequality, international disparities in the development of the productive forces, especially the subjective ones.
For most of the world, the relevant political horizon is not and has not been until now that of the construction of socialism, but that of the struggle against hunger, for “development” and “modernization” in the forms that the revolutions were able to forge for it. The Chinese revolution triumphed in part thanks to Lenin’s revisionist Marxism, the anti-imperialist Marxism of the Third International, adapted to local Chinese conditions by Mao and his comrades. Without the Chinese revolution led by the communists, the cultural and political unity of China, and the success of Deng’s reforms (a NEP on steroids, much more vast and profound than the Russian one) would be inconceivable. The real epic of world history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries began with this revolution and led, not without accidents or violent twists and turns, to the China of today.
In the German Ideology manuscripts, Marx and Engels spoke of the transforming, cathartic power of revolutions. The overthrow of the ruling classes allowed the formerly oppressed classes to shed “the shit of centuries”: to transform themselves into social forces capable of re-founding society. If this is so at the level of France or Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is even more so at the level of Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. today.
How can these suffering peoples (critically) appropriate the conquests of modern civilization and industry? We do not yet know. There is still going to be much trial and error, epic and tragedy. It is clear that forms of participatory democracy will become increasingly necessary if revolutionary processes are to maintain legitimacy and viability. But, surely, it will be through a complex struggle, marking a political and cultural distance from imperialist tutelage.
The liberation of these suffering masses, the overcoming of their historical traumas, of their inferiority complexes, will not result from the “developmentalist” charity of the rich capitalist world (nor of China or Russia). On the contrary, however much we may be repulsed by conflicts, however much the planet seems more fragile today than ever before, it is likely to take the form of acute and dangerous conflicts, of quixotic rebellions against the rich world, mass rebellions on an unprecedented historical scale.
In fairness, the logic that Lenin applied in 1905 and thereafter, which led him to recognize the centrality of the conflict between the poor peoples of the world and their colonial and imperialist masters was a logic that Marx and Engels had already suggested in their treatment of the Irish question. The English proletariat could not liberate itself as long as it benefited from the British subjection of Ireland (and, by extension) the other English overseas colonies. For the ultimate good of the English workers themselves, their immediate interests had to be subordinated and the independence of Ireland (not necessarily for socialism in Ireland) had to be put first.
If the general path to building a communist society is the international unity of the workers, how can such unity be forged without prioritizing the interests and needs of the most disadvantaged sectors of the world working class? The morale of a cohesive group requires it. A group (a class, in this case) that puts the interest of its privileged members before solidarity with those left behind is a group (a class) in dissolution. In a sentence: the struggle against imperialism is the form that the struggle for socialism must necessarily take in a world with abysmal international inequalities.
If the socialist horizon is to continue to inspire anyone, what other path can there be? How can there be a shorter path than the anti-imperialist struggle to build that radical democratic society — of, by and for the direct producers in free association — that the socialists have dreamed of?
