On Socialism and the Global South

[Image courtesy of Harvard University Press]

When people think of socialism, they tend to imagine the Soviet Union. But that’s only part of the story – and one that leaves out most of the world.

In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World, historian Jeremy Friedman looks at the ways in which countries around the world found their own Cold War-era paths towards socialism. In each instance, Friedman looks at how lessons from other countries were applied or forgotten, often through deep dives into previously inaccessible archives.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How did you choose the countries you decided to focus on – Indonesia, Angola, Iran, Chile and Tanzania?

I wanted to cover the Cold War geographically and chronologically. So, I chose two countries in Asia, one in the Middle East, one in Africa and one in Latin America. I picked those five partly because each is paradigmatic of a major question. With Chile, it’s how do you achieve socialist revolution within a democratic constitutional situation? In Iran, it’s how do you do that in a society dominated by religion? In Tanzania, it’s how do you do it in a society with an agricultural economy? Each addresses the question, “How do you get to socialism with all these factors that Marx didn’t necessarily envision?”

Why did you start the book with Indonesia?

Well, because it's one of the earliest cases in which there seemed to be a real possibility for a communist takeover in the developing world.

Indonesia is one of the largest countries in the developing world and had the largest non-ruling communist party by membership in the 1960s. It ends with this immense tragedy; when you think about the mass murders of the 20th century, Indonesia is up there. Yet it doesn't get a lot of attention in the West, even though at least half a million people were killed [after a failed coup attempt that led to decades of dictatorship].

This very dramatic story introduces almost all of the questions the book later deals with: democracy, religion and development.

In the case of Iran, you noted that the founders of the Islamic Republic developed their ideology partially as a response to Marxism. What do you mean by that?

Well, so socialism made certain promises to people in the developing world: It would bring growth, justice and international dignity.

These are countries that had been dominated by imperialists and were oppressed internationally, and so this also meant a reassertion of national self-dignity. And over time, socialism was seen to have failed at these things.

In the Middle East, pan-Arabism was the dominant ideology from the 1940s into the ‘60s, and it was very heavily colored by socialism. Nasser in Egypt had socialist programs, the Baath Party in Syria and in Iraq was built on socialist ideology. Algeria was very heavily socialist. And in ‘67, the defeat of Nasser by the Israelis in the Six-Day War was seen as a major defeat – the socialists had failed to deliver on their promises.

Islamism basically claimed, “We can do the same things socialism promised, and we can do them better.” Islam can provide social justice, Islam can provide national dignity, Islam can provide economic growth. It’s interesting, some people tend to see the Islamic revolution in Iran as a return to the Middle Ages when it's actually a response to the failure of socialism. I mentioned in the book that Ayatollah Taleghani, later known as the Red Ayatollah, was the main imam in the largest mosque in Tehran in the 1940s, at a time when most young Iranians were drawn towards Marxism. He wrote about Islamic economics and how Islam was a better way to get towards economic goals – it was a better way for growth, it was a better way for justice. And this was in part to bring people back to the mosque who were moving towards Marxism.

One instance of local traditions meshing (rather than competing with socialism) is Tanzania. Tell me about the country’s Ujamaa socialism.

Ujamaa is the most consistent version of what was called “African socialism” at the time. African socialism meant a number of things, but the key element was that Africa had its own communitarian traditions that preceded capitalism, and so the way for Africa to move towards socialism was to remove the veneer of imperialism and the colonial economy and go back to its communitarian traditions. This was seen as non-Marxist in a couple of ways. First of all, the claim was that Africa didn't have classes – class had been imported by the richer Europeans. And if Africa doesn’t have classes, it couldn’t have class struggle, which is the engine of Marxism.

But the problem is that going back to a pre-colonial economy means going back to an agrarian economy. And then the question is, how do you build self-sufficiency and prosperity through an agrarian economy? That's very hard to do. What Tanzania tried to do was basically bootstrap its way up: communalize agriculture, develop an agricultural surplus, sell that abroad to create hard currency to use for industrialization. That's a very slow, difficult process, and it became impossible in the 1970s with the oil shock.

You write that the USSR basically invested in Chile as a kind of alternate model to Cuban socialism. What was going on in Chile that made it interesting to the USSR?

Chile is really important because it represents the one example of a democratically elected Marxist president who intended to try to build something like Soviet-style socialism. The question, of course, was how to get there without suspending the constitution and eliminating other parties and taking control of the press, that sort of thing. The reason why this was so interesting to the Soviets was that Chile was not a fully developed industrialized country yet, but it had a more mixed economy than, for instance, Cuba.

In Europe, the two largest parties dating back to the end of the Second World War were the French and Italian communist parties. And the question there was always, how do you get those parties to power without having to have some sort of revolution or military coup? How do you get to power through electoral politics? Chile seemed to be a model for how the French and Italian communist parties could come to power.

By the late 1940s, the progress of communism had been stopped on the European continent, and given that these were NATO countries, the United States was not going to simply allow the Soviets to invade. But what was the United States going to do, for example, if the French Communist Party joined a coalition, and managed to elect a president? It’s much harder to go in there and overthrow a democratically elected government in Paris. So, Chile seemed to offer that model – this is the way to break the Cold War stalemate.

Do you think the Soviet style of influence during the Cold War changed over time?

I think it certainly changed. One of the most important changes is that it eventually allowed a lot more room for market forces in the economy. This wasn’t just a Soviet shift – it's a shift that happened across socialist worlds. Market reforms are something we associate with China in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I don’t think this is China shifting towards capitalism so much as China doing the same sort of tinkering with socialism that others were doing as well. The classic centrally planned economy, the Stalinist model in which the state has to decide all the inputs and outputs and everything the country produces, is just not very efficient.

The key is to use market forces to decide inputs and outputs and make the economy more efficient while also keeping the state in control of its main elements. This is a model that survives the Cold War. So even today, if you look at the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) in the United States, their version of socialism is one in which the government uses certain kinds of levers to perhaps control the financial sector, or labor legislation and tax laws, to force private companies to respond to social incentives without leaving the government to do the planning and production itself.

Another major transformation in the Soviet approach is the elevation of identity politics. If you look at the early Bolshevik Party and the early versions of the Comintern, there was a lot of ambiguity and a lot of ambivalence around the roles of nationalism and religion and race. The Soviets were very insistent during this early stage that proletarians had no nationality. Religion was the opiate of the masses, things like this. But over time they began to embrace other narratives of identity. And in many ways, those came to swamp class-based identity. Within the socialist world, people began to think of themselves more as members of a nationality, or a religion or a race, and their oppression in those terms, than as members of a class.

Is there anything else that you'd like to mention that I haven't asked you?

I’d like people to come away from this book thinking about what ideology means. Especially today in the U.S., to say someone is ideological is almost to say that they’re irrational. And I think that's a mistake. Ideology is basically an answer to a problem, which is that reality is so complicated that if we attempted to understand it in all its complexity we would be paralyzed.

What ideology does is it simplifies reality: It gives us answers to what matters, what doesn't matter, what should I focus on? Everybody has an ideology – it's just that some people are conscious of it.