Part One of this series discussed how the founders of Marxism—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels —addressed the issues of economic development, imperialism and colonialism of their day. Part One made the case that although Marx and Engels were political active in Europe in the 1800s, their theories and practice were not “Eurocentric.” Part Two picks up the story of how Marx and Engels’ successors in the revolutionary Marxist movement addressed these issues.
How did the Marxists who came after Marx and Engels address the real political questions posed by Europe’s and North America’s colonial domination of Asia, Africa and Latin America? After all, the world that large socialist parties inhabited in the late-19th and 20th centuries was one in which, until the Second World War, huge swathes of the globe were colonized.
The notion that Marxism paid little attention to the underdeveloped world or the “non-West” is even less true about Marxists after Marx than it was about Marx himself. As Vivek Chibber has recently written in his critique of anti-Marxist “postcolonial” theories,
The history of Marxian analysis in the twentieth century is the history of doing just this— understanding the specificity of the East. There is probably no project to which Marxist theorists have devoted more energy and time since the first Russian Revolution of 1905 than to understand the peculiar effects of capitalist development in the non-West. Perhaps this seems shocking at first blush, especially in light of the unceasing claims from postcolonial theory to the contrary. . .
To offer just one example: Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development was an explicit rejection of the argument that later developers would simply replicate the developmental path of the early ones.
Trotsky’s theory of “combined and uneven development” was a brilliant application of Marxist method to show how even in colonized or peasant-dominated countries, capitalist development could import the most modern productive techniques. This would create a working class with a social weight to achieve socialism, even with smaller numbers, because world economic development put socialism on the agenda.
Another major contribution to Marxism of the period after 1905 was Lenin’s writings, and subsequent leadership, on the question of the right of nations to self-determination. “The interests of the working class and of its struggle against capitalism demand complete solidarity and the closest unity of the workers of all nations,” Lenin wrote.
To Lenin, the national question was essential for building a united socialist movement in the midst of the Tsarist empire, where an estimated 57 percent of the population was non-Russian as a result of previous Tsarist conquest. This meant that socialists in the metropole (i.e. Russia) recognized the right of non-Russian nations in the empire their right to self-determination, up to and including their right to secede and to declare their own independent nation. This principle was put to the test during the Russian revolution and immediately after.
The period of the First World War was one of “wars and revolutions.” Not only did a workers’ revolution triumph in Russia, along with short-lived soviet governments in other countries from 1917 to 1920, but it was an era of awakening of oppressed peoples and nations around the world. Lenin’s 1913 article, “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia,” anticipated this, when he wrote in response to pro-democracy uprisings in China, “Everywhere in Asia … hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom,” while “advanced” Europe is “plundering China and helping the foes of democracy.” It’s also worth recalling that Marx had talked about a national liberation movement in India decades before it became a mass force.
For millions of oppressed people challenging the colonial domination of the empires that had plunged the world into war, the Russian Revolution represented a beacon of hope and an expression of solidarity with their struggles. As John Riddell has written, “It was not until the Russian revolution of 1917 that an alliance was forged between revolutionary socialism and the colonial freedom movement.” The revolutionary government’s policy, reflecting the Bolshevik position for self-determination of oppressed nations, repudiated all Tsarist claims to domination of nations in the former empire, as well as treaties with other imperialist powers that had, for example, supported a de facto partition of Turkey. It actively assisted movements against colonialism and imperialism. In forming the Third, or Communist, International in 1919, the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary socialists made championing freedom for colonies a condition of membership in the Comintern.The Third International’s position on the “national and colonial question” represented a marked advance over the older Western European dominated Second International’s position.
Although its congresses passed several anti-colonial resolutions in the late 1800s and early 1900s, its constituent parties maintained heterogeneity of views on the question. These spanned from open pro-colonial racism to the revolutionary rejection of colonies. In the 1907 Congress in Stuttgart, a resolution affirming the reform, rather than abolition of colonies, nearly achieved enough votes to pass. Compare that history to the 1919 declaration of the Comintern, which read, in part: “Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia: the hour of proletarian dictatorship will also be the hour of your liberation.”
In the first four congresses of the Communist International—the ones where Lenin was able to take an active role—the national and colonial questions were subject to a major debate and sets of resolutions in the 2nd and 4th. In the second, but more fully in the 4th, the conference debate and theses were shaped by participation from communists from the “East.”
The 2nd Congress, in which representatives from soviet Central Asia and six Asian countries outside of the former Tsarist empire participated, ended up adopting a resolution that changed the slogan of the international from “Workers of the world unite” (from the stirring last line of the Communist Manifesto) to “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite.” Lenin’s views were not simply accepted. In fact, Lenin and the Indian delegate MN Roy clashed over the analysis of society in the colonized countries, and the attitude to take to the movements fighting for national independence in the colonized countries.
Lenin argued that Communists should support the “bourgeois democratic national liberation movements,” while Roy opposed this, arguing more for a peasant and worker led movement for socialism. In the end, both Lenin and Roy modified their theses, with the final resolutions calling for communists to support “revolutionary national liberation movements,” and to struggle against the influence of religious ideology and “pan-Islamism” in the liberation movements of the Muslim-majority countries.
Perhaps more important than the 2nd congress were subsequent meetings, held in 1920 and 1921, in Baku, Azerbaijan and in Moscow. The first, the Congress of the Peoples of the East, brought more than 2,000 delegates, primarily from central Asia. Famously, it issued a call for “jihad” against British imperialism that was trying to impose control over sections of the Balkans, Iran, Turkey and central Asia.
The follow-up Congress of the Toilers of the East in 1922, had fewer delegates than in Baku, but included groups from China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan that represented the embryos of the worker, peasant and communist movements in those countries. The congress resolved to “support every national-revolutionary movement, but support it in so far as it is not directed against the proletarian movement.”
In the 4th Congress, held later in 1922, a fuller debate was held—even though many delegates still felt more discussion was needed. The transcripts of the debate on the “Eastern Question” cover more than 100 pages of the huge (1,500 page) collection of the congress debates, and it includes such highlights as the proclamation from an Egyptian delegate that soon red flags would fly over the pyramids as they fly over the Kremlin in Moscow.
The congress made a number of important decisions, including supporting Roy’s call for a “anti-imperialist united front” of communists and other anti-imperialists in the colonies; a reversal of earlier opposition to pan-Islamism at the urging of Indonesian and Algerian communists; resolutions in support of Black liberation in the U.S., based on the reports of Black communists Claude McKay and Otto Huiswood. It also called on the French Communist Party to repudiate a section of Algerian members who opposed the liberation of Algeria from France. In a less positive development, the Congress avoided a sharp condemnation of South African strikes, that were provoked in part, in opposition the employment of Blacks in the mines.
And it did not discuss at all—and heard only a positive report on—the recently-formed Chinese CP’s Comintern-urged decision to enter the bourgeois nationalist Guomindang (GMD) Party. Several years later, this decision would end in disaster, with GMD leader Chiang Kai-Shek launching a military coup and massacring the communists. But that history is tied up with the isolation of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinization of the Comintern, and its conversion into an instrument for Stalin’s counterrevolutionary policies.
After the Second World War, Stalinism, with its five-year programs and crash industrialization, appealed to a generation of postcolonial nationalists who called their movements “African Socialism” or “Arab Socialism,” and who in many cases won the support of the USSR. Thus, for years, the idea of socialism and Marxism was emptied of its content as workers emancipation and replaced with the idea that socialism was synonymous with state-led industrial and economic development. In China, mad schemes of crash industrialization like the Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of 30-50 million people from famine. While this would be the topic of an entire talk on its own, acknowledging this is important because in the failure of most of these experiments, one can find a root of the post-colonial critique of “Marxism” and its attempt to replicate in a few years economic developmentwhich took centuries in Europe.
Does this matter today?
So why does any of this matter today? First, something should be said for accuracy. The notion that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology is part of the “common sense” of much of the left today. But much of that “common sense” is based on lack of knowledge, faulty logic and political bias. Knowing the actual theory and record of revolutionary Marxism is the best way to challenge this.
Second, we have to do more than defend Marxism from its critics. We actually have to make a positive case for it as the best theory for understanding global capitalism and developing strategies to oppose its degradation of people and the environment. Marxism helps us to understand that capital is a global phenomenon that penetrates all societies to one extent or another, and forces them to conform to its logic. This doesn’t mean that all societies are on the same trajectory, or that imperialism doesn’t shape the levels of economic development, industrialization, or poverty around the world, or that there can’t be different responses to capital in country after country. But it means that “capitalism” and “development” are not just “Western” ideas that societies can “opt out,” from. This means that concepts like capital and labor, class and class struggle give us a way to understand politics around the world.
In fact, empirically today, developing countries, which include some eastern European countries and the global South, account for almost three-quarters of industrial workers in the world. So one would think that Marxism would be more important in analyzing capitalism in the global South rather than less important. And crucially, the other side of the coin, is that capital’s penetration creates resistance to it. Again, this doesn’t mean that the working classes of all societies respond in the same way, but it means that they are compelled to struggle in order to defend their dignity and living standards. It’s worth remembering that the largest general strike in history took place a few years ago in India.
Accepting these ideas leads out of the blind alley that the idealist theories of postcolonial studies and autonomism lead us. First, it leads away from the idea that, despite their origin in Western Europe, that there is something “Western” about the core concepts of Marxism. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the different idealist theories opposed to Marxism is that, in their criticism of Marxism as a Western ideology, they actually end up reproducing many of the old Orientalist myths that considered the non-West as “inscrutable” and “exotic.” They accepted the Orientalist division of the world into East and West (or maybe what we would say today, North and South). And in their refutation of the applicability of Marxism to understanding of non-Western societies, they advanced the idea that some sort of transhistorical culture defined the “essence” of Eastern societies and peoples that was outside the ken of Western Marxist thought. The Syrian Marxist Sadik Jalal al-’Azm called this “Orientalism in reverse.” Whether conscious of it or not, all of these critiques of Marxism are based on an idealist understanding of the world, which owes more to the proudly Eurocentric idealist philosophy of Hegel, than it does to Marx. As Gilbert Achcar put it very well, if Orientalism consists of a number of prejudices against Oriental culture, there is no more—nor better—radical critique of this than the fundamental Marxist insight that explains “every cultural form as the historical product of material circumstances” and shows how “culture” changes when material conditions change.
And if the purveyors of this idealism see the East in “essentialist” terms, the same is true of how they see the West or North. The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton makes the point so well in his Why Marx Was Right that it is worth quoting him in full:
Emancipatory traditions of thought mark the history of Europe, just as the practice of slavery does. Europe is the home of both democracy and the death camps. If it includes genocide in the Congo, it also encompasses the Paris Communards and the Suffragettes. It signifies both socialism and fascism, Sophocles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, civil rights and Cruise missiles, a legacy of feminism and a heritage of famine. Other parts of the globe are equally marked by a mixture of enlightened and oppressive practices. Only those who in their simpleminded way see Europe as wholly negative and the postcolonial “margins” as purely positive could overlook this fact.
One result of the emancipatory traditions that took root in Europe is that key, foundational leaders of communist and socialist organizations in Asia, Latin America and Africa, became socialists in Europe and North America. Sen Katayama, one of the main founders of the Japanese Communist Party, became a socialist while he studied in the U.S. He lived long periods of his life in the U.S. before relocating to Japan. Ho Chi Minh, the main leader of Vietnamese independence in the wars against France and the U.S., was a delegate to the fifth Communist International congress from the French Communist Party. Ho, from a relatively advantaged family in France’s Vietnamese colony, was educated in France and became political active there. José Carlos Mariátegui, considered the main founder of Peru’s communist party and who many acknowledge as an original theorist of “Latin American Marxism”, became a Marxist in Italy during the “Biennio Rosso,” the period of workers’ upheaval immediately after the First World War.
These revolutionary biographies illustrate a couple of key points. First, they show that Marxism is an internationalist political current. It was common for revolutionaries to join the socialist movement in one country and to build socialist organizations and social movements in whatever country they found themselves later. Second, even though figures like Ho and Mariátegui became Marxists in Europe, it would be laughable to characterize them as “Eurocentrists.”
When Mariátegui returned to Peru, he delivered a key 1923 lecture to an audience of working-class activists. He said he wanted to impart the revolutionary experience of Europe and the rest of the world to the vanguard of Peruvian workers because “the proletariat is not a spectator, but an actor.” He continued: “Perú, like the other peoples of the Americas, is not, then, outside the crisis, it is inside it.” Mariátegui’s 1923 lecture illustrated a constant theme of his: that although socialism in Latin America must be based on Latin American realities, it was not exceptionalist. He conceived of socialism in Latin America as part of a world socialist and working-class movement.
This brief history should demonstrate that both theoretically, and as a matter of practice, revolutionary Marxism is neither Eurocentric nor unconcerned with issues of underdevelopment, agrarian struggles or even cultural questions of colonized and oppressed peoples. The Comintern debates show that, while the socialists of that tumultuous period didn’t get everything “right,” they certainly tried to breathe life into the slogan of “workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite.”
Mariátegui, whom contemporary commentators have championed as a critic of “orthodox” Marxism and a defender of an “indigenous” socialism, considered himself nothing more or less than a “tried and true” Marxist. He used the tools of Marxism to produce an analysis that was both thoroughly Marxist and attuned to the particular circumstances of early 20th century Latin America. As he wrote in 1928,
The Latin American Revolution will be nothing more and nothing less than a stage, a phase of the world revolution. It will simply and clearly be the socialist revolution. . . . We certainly do not want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation. We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.
The challenge for us today is to take the tools that Marxism has provided us and to apply them to understanding and confronting 21st century global capitalism.
Suggested reading
Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism(Haymarket, 2013)
V.I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/
Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects/Permanent Revolution, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/index.htm
José Carlos Mariátegui, Archivo (in Spanish), https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/obras.htm
John Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Haymarket, 2012)
Lance Selfa
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
