Rizescu's Project SPE III

Voicu Dragos-Constantin

SPE III

Revolution on the Peripheries

World Communism and the Third World (I)
At the beginning of the last century a series of revolutions in Russia (1905),

Turkey (1906), Persia (1909), Mexico (1910), China (1911) and Ireland
(1916) announced that the inhabitants of the colonial world were not
prepared to be passive spectators of the historical process. Yet beyond
freeing themselves from the direct or indirect control of the great powers, the
goals of these revolutionary movements were ambiguous, even
contradictory. Were they to enable the newly liberated states to enter the
world capitalist system? Or were they to achieve a more fundamental
freedom for the mass of their populations - in other words, were they to
bring about socialism?
At the time most people, including most Marxists, believed that only the
former was possible. Socialism would have to wait until colonial and pre-
capitalist domination had been overthrown. However, Leon Trotsky began to
develop two concepts which suggested that socialism might be a more
immediate prospect.
One was the theory of "uneven and combined development". Unevenness

means that societies reach particular stages of development at different
historical times. Combination means that, under certain conditions, societies
can leap over aspects of one or more of these stages to create new hybrid
formations. Starting from the imperialist stage of capitalism, which opened
during the last third of the 19th century, advanced forms of capitalist
production were introduced into otherwise pre-capitalist societies, causing
new tensions.
In particular, capitalist industrialisation gave rise to working class
movements that, because of the intensity with which they were formed, had
the potential to rise to higher levels of theoretical understanding and
industrial militancy than those in the dominant imperialist countries. These
new working class movements often found themselves in conflict with state
machines that were much weaker than those of the older capitalist countries.
The other was the strategy of permanent revolution - made possible by

uneven and combined development. The working classes in the developing
world, although a minority of the population, have a social weight greater
than their numbers. This, Trotsky argued, made them potentially capable of
leading the other oppressed classes directly towards socialism.
This strategy only gained majority support within the working class
movement during the Russian Revolution of 1917. In every other situation
where it has been applicable, alternative strategies have been followed which
have led, at worst, to total defeat (China in the 1920s) or, at best, to partial
victories which gained considerably less than was possible (South Africa in
the 1990s). A crucial factor in these failures has been the absence of a
sizeable revolutionary party capable of successfully arguing for permanent
revolution.
Before the middle of 1980s the Soviet strategy in the Third World was based
on a number of unshakable postulates that were rooted in the concept of "the
world revolutionary process". A pattern was formed that no politician or
diplomat could change. It seemed that this pattern perfectly suited the
official ideology and gave sufficiently good explanations to the processes in
the Third World or, as it was customary to say, "on the periphery of the world
capitalist economy".1
1 Neil Davidson, Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize 2003.

If asked - what offices in the Kremlin, the Central Committee of the CPSU
directed the development of the Soviet foreign policy strategy in the 1950s-
80s, we find it hard to answer the question. Most often this work, that should
have been highly creative, was done on the eve of every Congress of the
CPSU by a group of appointed "thinkers", several leading officials from the
Central Committee of the CPSU, representatives of other foreign policy
agencies apt to "theoretical quest". For example, Academicians Nikolai
Inozemtsev and Georgy Arbatov were invited to prepare materials for every
party Congress.
Heads of other scientific foreign policy centres regularly submitted

recommendations on the world revolutionary process to the Central
Committee. Proposals coming from this collective "intellectual machine"
were rarely marked by novelty. At best they constructed a more modern
theory of "mature socialism".
To a considerable extent the concept of "the world revolutionary process"

was a transformation of the idea of a "world-wide socialist revolution". After
1917 Vladimir Lenin expected its speedy beginning but soon realized that it
was utopia. Stalin proved himself more as a pragmatist, than theorist. He
plunged into constructing socialism "in one separate country". By the mid-
1930s, his thoughts and actions transformed him from a revolutionary into a
dictator whose actions undermined socialism. In these conditions the idea of
separating evolution from revolution in the development of humanity
disappeared from Soviet science.
In private conversations experts often spoke of the flatness of old approaches

and the variety in the development of the world community. The Marxist
theory of the world revolutionary process was leading us to mistakes in
evaluating the international situation. One can argue about the usefulness or
harmfulness of fantasies in personal life, but they are absolutely out of place
in politics.
The old approach claimed, for example, that after World War II the transition
from capitalism to socialism became the main content of the epoch. It was
said that the transition was marked by the competition of two social systems:
socialism and capitalism. It was stated that the latter was going through a
general crisis. If everything had been that simple!
It was at that time in Moscow, when a considerable positive change occurred

in the evaluation of "the laws of world development". Intellectuals spoke of
the possibilities for the working class to win power by peaceful means. The
struggle for peace was declared the most important task of Communists and
Socialists disregarding ideological differences. In the context of the present
day broad cooperation on the international arena one might find these
changes "insignificant", a mere trifle, but we should judge the situation in
terms of the times. In the Soviet Union the whole Stalinist epoch was going
down into history. Thinking in the vein of the Communist International was
questioned and even altered.
After the purifying 20th CPSU Congress in 1956, where Nikita Khrushchev
exposed Stalin's crimes, everything seemed possible. Everyone expected that
the Soviet society would develop fast and effectively. Many people hoped
that ideological stereotypes would be dropped from the Soviet foreign policy.
It seemed that the process had begun. However, the weight of the old
ideology turned out greater than it had seemed.
2
In the second half of the 1950s the question aroused, how the Soviet Union
should regard the possibilities of a political and social development when
violence would not become the main instrument for achieving the hegemony
of the working class in a revolution.
It seemed that the 1959 visit of Nikita Khrushchev to the United States at the
invitation of President Eisenhower could break the backbone of the Cold
War. Alas, the frosts grew harsher. At that time Anatoli Gromyko in a
2 Anatoli and Alexey Gromyko, Letter 7 Soviet Strategy in the world.
conversation with his farther asked him whether ideological differences
should not prevent the USSR and the USA from maintaining their relations
in the spirit of compromise. "Opposing ideologies, - Andrei Gromyko said, -
always hindered and will hinder relations between states.
In China in 1949, Cuba in 1959 and a host of other countries the

transformations masqueraded as communist in content, but in effect acted as
the handmaidens of state capitalist development. Indeed, the Chinese state is
now one of the most dynamic sectors in the global capitalist economy. The
working class in the Third World has risen time and time again during the
same period, but nowhere succeeded in taking power on its own behalf. Does
this mean that Trotsky's claims for its revolutionary role have been proved
wrong?
Does the Third World still exist?
The first thing we need to establish is that the Third World - in the sense of a
group of countries sharing a common position of underdevelopment within
the capitalist world system - still exists. Many people, on both sides of the
globalisation debate, claim that it does not. They give three main reasons for
this.
First, there is the increasingly differentiated pattern of socioeconomic

development across these countries. What possible comparison can there be
between a "failed state" like Haiti and economic and military giants like
India? Second, there is increasing homogenisation across the world.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in their book Empire that, "The
spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second and Third) have been
scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third
in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all." Third, there is a
reluctance among anti-capitalists to differentiate between regions of the
world, not least because globalisation from above is increasingly binding all
populations to the same exploitative machine.3
Nevertheless, it is still possible to characterise the Third World as having

some or all of the following features. First, the majority of the population
tends to be poor in absolute rather than relative terms. Second, the state is
often unstable and consequently prone to both internal police repression and
external military adventures.
Many of those who dismiss the idea of the working class making a
revolution in the Third World celebrate the electoral successes of Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia as an alternative strategy.
But again this is to miss the point.
Welcome though the success of these leaders is, they were only elected and
sustained in office because of mass mobilisations at the heart of which were
working class movements. In Bolivia, for example, the previous
government's plans to sell off natural gas supplies were met with months of
blockades and occupations in the countryside that helped feed a growing
revolt among workers in the towns and cities. Ultimately the privatisation
plan was defeated.
But the unevenness in uneven and combined development does not only
work in a positive direction. In some cases, entire areas, most of which are in
Africa, have been abandoned by capital in any economic sense. There the
working class is not growing, but shrinking and increasingly atomised as
scarcity drives societies into territorial wars and ethnic fragmentation. It
would be absurd to say that only the working class can solve the crises in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan or Haiti, if by this we mean the
individual working classes of those countries. It is here that the international
aspects of permanent revolution are still decisive - the solution cannot be
internal, but depends on the actions of the working class in the surrounding
countries.
3 Call for papers, The Peripheries of the European Revolutionary

Process(es) 19171923.
But even in those countries where there are strong labour movements, there
is an important new social development which is as yet politically
undetermined. In its original formulation, permanent revolution involved the
working class leading other oppressed groups, the largest of which was the
peasantry. The peasantry has not vanished, but its importance is diminishing
because of the emergence and expansion of massive urban slum areas on the
peripheries of the great Third World cities.
These vast, improvised repositories of semi-surplus population, described in

horrifying detail by Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, are explosively volatile.
Involved in work mainly through what is politely referred to as the informal
sector, the relationship of these populations to organised labour tends to be
minimal. Yet potentially, they could be an extraordinary revolutionary force
(we have seen the possibilities of this in Bolivia) - or the foot soldiers of
right wing demagoguery. The question of leadership remains essential.4
For nearly 50 years Stalinism and varieties of secular nationalism dominated

the politics of the Third World, using organised labour as a stage army when
popular mobilisation was required. The pretensions of both have been
exploded, above all in the Middle East. The space vacated by the collapse of
Stalinism and secular nationalism means that millions of people who want to
be part of a movement against both imperialism and poverty are looking for
ideas that can take the struggle further than simply the establishment of
bourgeois democratic regimes.
This brings me to the final point. We can be sure that the working class will
continue to fight to improve its conditions - by which I mean increasing
democracy as much as improving living standards - as we have seen in Iran,
Egypt and China over the last year. What is still open is whether it can go
beyond this to challenge for state power.
4 Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism

1917-1991.

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Voicu Dragos-Constantin

Revolution on the Peripheries

At the beginning of the last century a series of revolutions in Russia (1905),

One was the theory of "uneven and combined development". Unevenness

The other was the strategy of permanent revolution - made possible by

1 Neil Davidson, Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize 2003.

Heads of other scientific foreign policy centres regularly submitted

To a considerable extent the concept of "the world revolutionary process"

In private conversations experts often spoke of the flatness of old approaches

It was at that time in Moscow, when a considerable positive change occurred

In China in 1949, Cuba in 1959 and a host of other countries the

Does the Third World still exist?

First, there is the increasingly differentiated pattern of socioeconomic

Nevertheless, it is still possible to characterise the Third World as having

3 Call for papers, The Peripheries of the European Revolutionary

These vast, improvised repositories of semi-surplus population, described in

For nearly 50 years Stalinism and varieties of secular nationalism dominated

4 Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism

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