Revolution in the Third World. Myths and Prospects 0855273399

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Also by Gérard Chaliand:

ARMED STRUGGLE IN AFRICA [1969 ) PEASANTS OF NORTH VIETNAM (1970) THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE (1972)

ALGERIA: Failure of a Revolution (1973)

THE HARVESTER PRESS, HASSOCKS, SUSSEX

Mythes Revol'utionna:lres du Tiers Monde © Iiditions du Seuil, 19?6 I

English language translation and Foreword Copyright © Gerard Chaliand, 1977

All rights reserved First published in 19??' by The l-Iarvesrer Press Ltd., Publisher: Iohn Spiers :~

.

2 Stanford Terrace, Hassocks Sussex, England.

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Chaliand, Gerard Revolution in the Third World.-(Marxist theory

and contemporary capitalism). I . Underdeveloped areas-Revolutionists I. Title II. Johnston, D III, Series $22.4'2'091724 JF60 ISBN 0-85527-339-9

Printed in the United States of America Set in Linotype Times Roman

This book is dedicated to the Vietnamese people, to the memory of

Amilcar Cabral, my friend Amiicar and above all to the memory of my mother. mother.

iJ

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to

exist forever after us; all we do i`§ E to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, ... would do the same as we do. ,

Pelopormesian War (105 THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian (105 V)

said: the When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: handle is one of us. TURKISH TURKISH PROVERB PROVERB

Gérard Chaliand has taken us on a remarkable Four d'horizon

of the revolutions and quasi-revolutions of the nonindustrialized world, the various peripheral regions of the capitalist worldeconomy. The tone of his book is one neither of unbridled optimism nor of intellectual cynicism. The book reflects, rather, a sense of sobriety. It is the work of someone engaged in the struggle for revolution who, at this point when the post-1945 world economic expansion has contracted (and when political alliances are shitting in sudden and often unexpected ways) considers what in fact has been accomplished by revolutionary movements up to now-and where we may go from here. Chaliand has chosen to look into the reality behind myths

-without malice, but without apologetics. Even before we ask

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FOREWORD

the question, Is he right? we are inclined to wonder, Should he do it? Many will fear that such an analysis will liquidate enthusiasm and sap the esprit of the revolutionary movements. We must ask ourselves whether this is so, and this leads us to think about the function of revolutionary myths. It does not take long to realize that the major function myths play is to mobilize people, by their promise and their optimism. Crushed by the realities of routine, we all hesitate to

engage ourselves in political struggle. We fear energy wasted. We fear repression. We fear cutting ourselves off from family and friends. One of the most basic mechanisms that sustains the status quo is always precisely this pervasive fear of the oppressed to break with routine. A revolutionary movement is precisely a

movement that calls for a break with routine, that demands sacrifice in the present for a better world in the future. And because the sacrifice is real and immediate, while the better world is in the distance and uncertain, it is always difficult to organize- Myths

are an essential element in the organizing process, and in sustaining the troops during the long political battle. Myths then are necessary. But there is an obverse side to the coin. Myths require constant reinforcement. There is nothing more destructive of myths than the transitional realities through which organized attempts at revolution pass. The just battle won, the movement may gain "power." But it is only the first battle,

and a second (and a third and a fourth) need to be fought. Then come the movements of betrayal of revision, of Realpolitik. And the process of disillusionment follows. This is a familiar story, but we have seldom considered what to do about it.

Gerard Chaliand's implicit answer is to talk about it, to think about it, and to make distinctions between the better and the worse. There is the recommendation in a nutshell. As a criterion of revolutionary judgment, employ "better" and "worse" rather than "good" and "bad." Can this be done without lapsing into eclectic reformism or a quietistic withdrawal into subjective concerns?

We confront a classic dilemma: we are caught between the Scylla of self-defeating dogmatism and the Charybdis of self-

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indulgent, multicolored, nuanced analysis tending toward art for the sake of the art. Chaliand tells us that while Charybdis once

seemed fiercest, it is now Scylla he worries about most. When he first wrote, he contributed to the myth of Third Worldism, he says, but now he repents and wishes to challenge the "myth of the socialist state." But the book is not an autobiography, either individual or collective. It is a call for reflection. I draw from the book three major conclusions, two of which are familiar, and one which is less frequently made. Conclusion number one is that a nationalist revolution that does not put its major stress on being simultaneously a social revolution is unlikely to yield results that will significantly improve the lot of the people. That is to say, there are nationalisms and nationalisms, there are better and worse, there are those which have politically and socially progressive outcomes, and others which are, if not retrogressive, at most reproductions of the same level of human oppression. Conclusion number two is that the great problem for real revolutionary movements (that is, the "better" of the nationalist movements) is the bureaucratization of the leadership. Chaliand reviews how it has happened everywhere. Counterrevolutionary cynicism? No, because again there is better and there is worse. The better are those countries, those movements, those leaders

who acknowledge the reality of the danger and who at least struggle against it, who search for ways to prevent ossification and the creation. of a "new class." It is in this sense th.at Amilcar Cabral is one of the "heroes" of the book, a model of a leader and thinker who struggled against this cancer. Conclusion number three, the most unusual, is less a conclusion than a query. Chaliand notices that, in many ways, two revolutionary movements stand out from the others-the Chinese and the Vietnamese, They succeeded in combining optimally the national and the social in their revolutionary emphases. They succeeded against enormous odds because they seemed to place

emphasis on the long-term political mobilization of the most oppressed segments of the population. Unlike not only the leaders

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FOREWORD

of the Second International but also Lenin-so argues Chaliandthey never waited for the "right moment." They did not know the meaning of the concept. Every moment was the right moment for something. A 1°evolutio11ary struggle is a ceaseless struggle, one requiring patience, energy, hope-and sobriety. But the query? The query is why should the Chinese and

the Vietnamese revolutionaries have been so much more "successful" than the Russian, the Arab, the African, the Latin American? For this is what Chaliand leads us to think. The answer is not argued; it is merely suggested. It is to be found in the

"weight of history," in some particularities of the cultural complex that envelops these two peoples and combines with their objective material realities to give birth to their movements. The fact that Chaliand finds two such relatively successful movements and not just one is vastly encouraging, since it means we are not faced with one more apologetic for uniqueness. But what elements in the "weight of history" account for these achievements? That is less dear. What is clear is that Chaliand is posing anew an ancient problematic, that of civilizations. He is not the only one to do so. More and more scholars from Asia and elsewhere in the Third World are doing this. But his is a

Western voice. What is the role of the heritage of diverse civilizations in the destruction of capitalism as a world system and the construction of socialism? The debate has scarcely begun, but it promises to be a central one of the next fifty years. What Chaliand's book does for us is to clear away the debris of accumulated nonsense so that we can think seriously about this problematic. And he does this without false elitism. This process of thinking is not re-

served to the intellectuals, leaving the "masses" shrouded in myth. All of us need to think about it, and we need not fear paralysis if we admit that the obstacles to surmount are real and knotty. -IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

It is nice to sit around listening to stories. It may be gratifying to believe that the "socialist" revolution is at hand in Asia, in Latin

America, perhaps even in Africa; or to imagine that it has already been achieved in the Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia, or in China, according to one's learnings, or to argue that bureaucracy is an avoidable evil and that in various places around the globe the proletariat, the historic agent of change, has been or is being "betrayed." As may be guessed from this beginning, I am interested, in this book, more in exploring myths and realities than in making predictions, The critical task of trying to focus on the facts underneath slogans, platforms, and proclamations is the main job for a participant observer, which I have been for some fifteen years.

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PREFACE

Revolution :`n in the Third World-a World~a scientifically inaccurate but convenient title-takes up the political and social problems of Asian, Latin American, and African countries, specifically, the problems of revolution in formerly colonial or semicolonial countries. I have chosen to make the book, which in any case could not be complete, as brief as possible, with a minimum of figures, quotations, and footnotes, at the risk of seeming simplistic, I have tried to use ordinary, clear language rather than specialized terminology, which very often serves only to mask banality. I have referred only in passing to economic questions and issues concerning development, which have so often been studied cerning development, studied already. Above all, I have tried, using comparative methods in the light of historical, sociological, and cultural factors, to restore political considerations to their rightful place in the study of the Third World-that is, to the number one place. After a general introduction dealing with underdevelopment and dependency, dependency, I take up three main aspects of revolutionary revolutionary change in the Third World: first, armed struggle, or, to be more precise, the political strategy of contemporary armed struggle in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, with its successes and failures, next, the nature and characteristics of the many national revolutions, which more often than not proclaim themselves socialist, especially in Africa, Africa; and finally, the nature and characteristics characteristics of the national and social revolutions called communist or socialista subject that requires not only concrete examples but also a

reminder of basic theoretical notions about "communism" and the transitional phase of socialism which is supposed to lead to it. Having had occasion to see at first hand how ideology tends to twist reality to fit lit its dogmas, I have tried as hard as I can to keep this book from being subjective. If it turns out that the prospects for real change change do not look bright, is it not true that they have always depended not on our wishes, but on the true relationship

of existing forces? A sort of Third Third World World euphoria began to be felt at the close of the 1950s, during the the Algerian war, and it was soon given a radical turn of events in the Cuban boost by the radical Cuban revolution revolution in

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1960-61. In France, some of those who had at first opposed war in Algeria now demanded, sometimes actively backed, the cause of Algerian independence. More than the first Indo-China war (for which France had not called up draftees), the Algerian "revolution," geographically so close to Europe, came to syrnbolize the art colonialist struggle. The works of Frantz Fanon, in particular his The Wretched of the Earth, inspired this anticolonialist trend of thought in Europe, and before long it could be found in the United States too, especially among blacks, where it merged with opposition to the war in Vietnam. Third World euphoria was an important characteristic of the 1960s, both in the Third World itself and in the West, especially among students and youth. It developed in the context set by "decolonization," whether by decree or by force, by the emergence of armed revolu~ tionary movements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, by a controversy between Russia and China, hinging, in the official texts, on problems of revolutionary strategy, and finally, by the rather dreary state of politics in most of the advanced industrial countries of the West. In speaking of Third Worldism, one cannot ignore the minority fraction of American blacks, who in the late 1960s shared the myth of a Tricontincntal Revolution via the figures of Fanon, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh, while at the same time feeding it with their own image. Within some elements of the European Far Left, the final embodiment of Third Worldism may well be found in the recent myth of immigrant workers as representing the potential revolutionary vanguard. There has been little analysis probing beneath the seemingly inexorable tide of events or beneath the rhetoric of leaders, getting at the actual matters at stake in a given convict or the actual nature of the independence gained or lost. Over and over again, leaders of African and Asian countries have opted for socialism in words alone, while numerous guerrilla groups have led people to overestimate their strength, their rootedness, and the scope of their operations. Many a transitory situation has been considered or proclaimed irreversible.

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PREFACE

Despite certain common traits, some of them fundamental -distorted and dependent economies, preponderance of traditional rural structures, a high population growth rate-the Third World, which in fact is an integral part of the capitalist system,. is sharply differentiated. The basic differences hinge on the level of development of productive forces, not on the extent of poverty. India is no doubt more poverty-stricken than Tanzania, but there is no comparison between them in the level of productive forces, countries like India, with a long-standing and powerful bourgeoisie and fairly significant, concentrated proletariat, are infinitely more complex societies than those of West Africa, for example. As to the level of development, Latin America, even though dominated by a single civilization and language (outside Brazil) , is far from homogeneous. And by the same token, there is not one Africa but several (even speaking only of tropical Africa), each with vastly different levels of productive forces, and for that matter vastly different historical stages, to be found within a single geographical area or country. A third great area, dominated by (although not identical with) Islam, stretches from Morocco to Central Asia, predominantly Arab, Iranian, and Turkish, again heavily differentiated (consider the differences between Egypt and Yemen, for instance). Then there is the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, with the Hinduized, Sinized, or Islamized states running from Burma to Vietnam, with the sharpest diiterences between lowland plains and mountains.

The term Third World

envelops in a semblance of unity what is in reality a multiplicity of worlds. For all the prevailing poverty, the situation is not explosive in most Asian, African, and Latin American countries. True, all

of them face the same problem: how to achieve real independence based on autonomous development. This is why it has been possible to call the overall situation revolutionary. But despite appearances and the well-fo unded impatience of those who are aware of the problems, the overall situation-for historical or social reasons, or thanks to partial reforms-is undergoing only very gradual modification.

Outside the context of generalized wars, when the

loosening of the dominant powers' grip may permit a propor-

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xvii

titanate assertion of autonomy, it is in fact unusual for the social contradictions within a formally independent country to become so acute as to set in a deep nationwide crisis. This occurs only when the grip of a foreign power is added to the crushing weight of a corrupt upper class unable to promote even lopsided growth. This offends everyone, and most of all the modernist petty bourgeoisie (civilian or military) whose access to what it considers its rightful functions is blocked. That is why most of the "revolutions" in the Third World during the past thirty years have been undertaken by the relatively small class of nationalist petty bourgeoisie who are eager to promote development. The classic example of this phenomenon was Egypt. The revolutions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have been thought up and led by intellectuals, who mostly came from the petty bourgeoisie. Only a few of them have been far-reaching. These revolutions have sought to overthrow established powers when the latter proved incapable of coming up with any response to the crises wracking their societies, In places where the ruling classes were unable or unwilling to adapt fast enough, the dissatisfaction of the petty bourgeoisie has joined with the humiliation felt by intellectuals; centuries of accumulated contradictions in rural society have come to a head when further distorted by the introduction of capitalism and aggravated by population pressure; and all this has combined to produce revel utionary explosions. Yet this has happened rather less often than the objective situation

might lead one to expect-perhaps because the modernist elites are weak or lack real links with the peasant masses, or because the industrial capitalist countries have intervened, directly or in~ directly, anxious to preserve their hegemony. Most of the time, for reasons we shall try to analyze, these revolutionary explosions, often restricted to "the top," have resulted only in nationalist regimes with statist tendencies, not in thoroughgoing revolutions affecting the social structure. This book is the product of seven years of living and traveling in North Africa, tropical Africa, the Middle East, the Indian

subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. I made the

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PREFACE

acquaintance of these countries in various ways and circumstances without any help or grant-usually, until quite recently, managing to get along by doing various kinds of manual labor or by living in rural villages where I was doing surveys. In most of the countries,

I got to know peasants as well as the kinds of city people a foreigner usually meets-administrators, tradesmen, and the local intelligentsia. My knowledge of a half-dozen languages almost always enabled me to communicate directly with those city people, but I often needed an interpreter in order to talk with the peasants. In quite different circumstances I have also had occasion to get to know the Third World of international congresses, experts, and

official meetings. For months, I have also observed and experienced what it is like to live in conditions of guerrilla or all-out war on three continents: living in the insurgent areas of GuineaBissau, doing a survey on peasants of North Vietnam while the American bombing raids were going on, living among Palestinian resistance movements in Jordan, investigating guerrilla areas in Colombia. Finally, I have met and in some cases gotten to know various political figures, party leaders, and heads of state-such as Che Guevara, Ben Bella, Julius Nyerere, Modibo Keita, Sékou Tours, and Amilcar Cabral. In this book, centered as it is on problems of national liberation, armed struggles, and the transitional phase theoretically leading to socialism, I have taken as my examples, from among some thirty Third World countries on three continents, a few that

seem to me to provide the best illustrations of historical evolution since World War II. In other words, I have attempted to delineate a sociological approach to armed struggles, revolutionary populisms, and modern bureaucracies.

Los A ngeles-Montreal-Paris I 972-75

G. C.

I want to thank Maxime Rodinson, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Juliette Minces for their numerous critical remarks, Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books for the confidence he manifested in my project from its earliest beginnings; Elisabeth Sifton of The Viking Press for her editorial work and her long-lasting support, and, of course, Diana Johnston for her intelligent and sensitive translation.

Foreword by Immanuel Wallersfein Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dimensions of Development

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I.

Work and Days

xiii xix 1 1

2.

The Prospect: A World Both Poorer and Less White The Emergence of Thz'rd Worldism Neocolonialism :'n Tropical Africa

10 17 24

3.

4.

PART ONE: The Political Strategy of Armed Struggle 1 Armed Struggle in Latin America I . Guerrilla Inflation: The Foco Theory as a Theory for Failure 2. Valencia and Guerrillas; The Case of Colombia

33

39 39

50

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CONTENTS

2 Revolution in Africa I . The Algerian Experience and the Illusions of Fanonism 2. The Independence of Guinea-Bissau and the

Heritage of Cabral 3 Liberation Struggles in Asia 1. The Experience of oNe South Vietnamese NLF PART TWO: The Metamorphosis of Socialism 4 Anti-Imperialist National Revolutions Nasser's Egypt

1.2.3.4.5.

Independent Algeria . . Revolutionary Experiments in Black Africa Peru: Populism from the Top Chile: Too Many Reforms, or Not Enough

Revolution S National and Social Revolutions 1. The Case of North Vietnam 6 The Theory and Practices of Marxism-Leninism I . A Retrospective Glance at the Bolsheviks and the Marxist Project 2. Self-Management in Yugoslavia 3. The Leninist Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy:

China Since the Cultural Revolution Conclusion: Toward What Futures? I The Third World and the Present Crisis

_

2. 3.

The Contemporary World and U.S. Diplomacy On Armed Struggle

4.

Perspectives on an Era

69 69

74

89 89

99 101 104 109 111 117 128 133 133 147

147 158 161

167 167 174 178 184

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