The conquered peoples seek a more just world
The emergence of socialism in the world of the colonized
The story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the story of the conquered peoples forming movements of liberation, the most advanced of them seeking transformations of the structures that had been imposed on them by the European conquerors during decades of colonial rule. They sought to reformulate the promise and the hope of democracy from the colonial situation.
This is a story that is not known in the colonizing nations of the North. In the first decades of the twentieth century, colonialism was treated as a civilizing mission, as a process that would eventually uplift the conquered peoples to a higher level of civilization. It was not that the peoples of the North were by nature racists. Rather, they had been led, with the support of the social sciences, to the notion that there are distinct “races” in the human species, with different levels of advancement in civilization. This ideological dissemination had the political function of justifying and legitimating the European domination of the peoples of the world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, peoples who in general had darker skin color.
The anti-colonial movements of the conquered peoples during the first half of the twentieth century challenged the ideology of racial inferiority, and indeed discredited it in practice. So the legitimating ideologies of the North shifted to a more sophisticated terrain, and again it was the social sciences that played a role, formulating modernization theory, which put forth a distinction between traditional and modern cultures. The former supposedly lacked an achievement orientation, a spirit of entrepreneurship, a rational approach to nature, and a differentiation of economy from society. Traditional societies, therefore, were incapable of promoting economic development. This formulation implied that colonialism would ultimately have positive consequences for the colonized, in that the colonial process includes the dissemination of modern ideas and ways of life. Modernization theory, or some variant of it, enjoyed wide dissemination in the societies of the North in the 1950s and 1960s.
But in the late 1960s, the assumptions of modernization theory fell like a house of cards in the wind. The catalysts were the movement for civil rights and black power and the student movement against the war in Vietnam, unfolding in the breast of the nation that had emerged from the Second World War as the hegemonic core power. There emerged the demand to look at the world from the perspective of the conquered and colonized peoples.
As noted in my commentary of April 11, 2023, these social dynamics impacted Immanuel Wallerstein, who personally encountered militants in Africa insisting that theirs was a colonial situation, and any analysis useful to them must proceed from the perspective of the colonized. This conversion experience led Wallerstein to reconstruct social scientific knowledge as an integration of the disciplines of history, economics, political theory, and sociology from the vantage point of the colonial situation. During the 1970s and 1980s, he formulated the basic conceptualization of world-systems analysis, which sees a geographical division of labor between core and peripheral regions, with the latter confined to the exportation of cheap raw materials on a base of forced labor and to the importation of goods manufactured in the core. It was the imposition of this peripheral role by the colonizers, with the support of actors among the colonized, that was the source of the underdevelopment and impoverishment of the peoples, and not their traditionalism.
However, Wallerstein and the New Left of the late 1960s were not able to forge a new social consensus that could guide the political culture. What they fomented was division, with some superficially embracing certain aspects of the new theory and others desperately clinging to past years of greatness and glory. During the 1970s, the theoretical reflection in the North collapsed in ideological exhaustion, giving rise to the turn to the right and to the global neoliberal project in 1980.
Given this scenario, it is hardly surprising that the societies of the North never undertook to understand what the conquered peoples were attempting to construct. It is a fatal flaw, because what the conquered peoples were beginning to construct was a powerful synthesis of modern Western ideas with their own traditional values, forged in a context of political struggle for political sovereignty and economic development. It is a synthesis that today seeks to rescue the world-system from decadence, division, and chaos.
I propose today to review several projects of reconstruction developed by the conquered peoples.
Haitian Revolution
In The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James1 maintains that the slaves of San Domingo were caught up in the spirit of the French Revolution and its proclamation of liberty, quality, and fraternity. Beginning as isolated slave uprisings, by 1791 some 12,000 slaves had been organized to conduct large actions under leadership of Boukman, a Voodoo High Priest.
At the time of the outbreak of the slave rebellion, Toussaint L’Ouverture was a 45-year-old slave with administrative experience and authority provided by his position as steward of livestock on the plantation of Bayou de Libertas. More educated than the great mass of slaves, he had an understanding of local and international political affairs as a result of reading and conversations in the town of Le Cap, two miles from the plantation. A month after the rebellions began, determining that the rebellion was of lasting significance, he made his way toward their camps.
Toussaint soon emerged as one of the leaders of the process of rebellion. After the breakdown of negotiations with the colonial authorities, Toussaint began in July 1792 to train an army capable of fighting European troops. During 1793, his revolutionary army grew in size and quality, such that by January 1794 he was in command of 4000 men, and his army controlled a cordon that ran from east to west across the colony. In May 1794, the Jacobin French government abolished slavery in the colonies and appointed Toussaint Brigadier-General, enlisting his support in the war against Spain and England, which were seeking to take control of the colony. In May 1796, he was named Assistant to the Governor, and early in 1797, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief and Governor. By 1797, he was in undisputed command of the colony, and by 1798, he had the confidence of whites, blacks, and mulattoes.
Toussaint took seriously the idea of equality for all proclaimed by the French Revolution. He believed that the best hope for the blacks of San Domingo was to seek protection of fundamental rights as citizens of the French Republic.
Toussaint believed that parceling the plantations into small plots of independent producers would limit the land to subsistence production and thus would retard the development of education, transportation, and commerce. He therefore implemented a development plan based on capitalist large-scale agricultural production for export, with the emancipated slaves as wage laborers. The plan mandated that agricultural workers be paid wages equivalent to one-quarter of the value of what they produced, thus providing incentive for work in the salary structure. The workday was limited to 12 hours (dawn to dusk had been the previous norm), and employers were not permitted to whip workers.
Toussaint had a conciliatory policy toward whites, seeking to reassure them that the ex-slaves did not seek vengeance. But at the same time, Toussaint insisted that whites accept that a new society was being forged, one which protected the rights of all, regardless of color or previous condition of servitude.
For a brief moment, it worked. Under his governance, cultivation prospered. In a year and one-half, cultivation was restored to what it had been in the flourishing days of the old colony. A crucial missing element, however, was the failure of the Jacobin Revolution to consolidate power in France. In 1802, the forces of Napoleon put an end to the great project of slave emancipation.
Latin American independence and republican revolution
The Latin American revolution of 1810-1824 sought not only independence from Spain but also envisioned a republican society characterized by equality, in which the democratic rights and human needs of people of modest resources, including indigenous peoples and persons of African descent, would be recognized. The revolution envisioned a profound social transformation, including the abolition of slavery, the elimination of large plantations and the distribution of land through agrarian reform, the development of national industry, and the protection of indigenous communal lands.2
The Latin American revolution sought true sovereignty for the new republics, and it believed that true independence would be best protected through their union in the form of a federation of Latin American republics or the formation of a single nation. In 1824, Simón Bolívar emitted a call for a Congress that would establish an assembly that would be formed exclusively by republics that had been Spanish colonies; that would be a permanent association of a supranational character with permanent institutions; that would recognize the borders formed during the colonial process as establishing the frontiers of the independent republics; and that would be a commercial and military confederation. The conference was held in Panama in 1826, with representatives from Colombia (which then included Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama), Peru (then Peru and Bolivia), Central America (then Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras) and Mexico. The delegations met for three weeks and produced a treaty with 32 articles, providing a foundation for a sovereign Latin American confederation. However, the governments of Peru, Central America, and Mexico did not ratify the treaty.
The failure of union and integration in 1826 was a consequence of the pursuit of particular interests by powerful actors. Throughout the region, revolutionary leaders encountered opposition from the local estate bourgeoisie, whose interests were tied to the superexploitation of labor and the exportation of raw materials to the core nations. The local estate bourgeoisie was able to prevent federation and unity and to promote political fragmentation, resulting in a greater number of smaller and weaker states controlled by local elites.
For the Cuban scholar Roberto Regalado,3 there was not in the nineteenth century an adequate economic base for the implementation of the revolutionary ideal of Latin American integration and union. Urban manufacturing was limited, and domestic markets were weak. The dream of Latin American union and integration would be retaken by progressive Latin American republics in the beginning of the twenty-first century, under different economic and political conditions.
The People’s Republic of China
Among the youth of China in the 1890s, there emerged a rejection of the Confucian sociopolitical order, for its evident incapacity to respond effectively to Western commercial and military penetration. They were enamored of Western ideas of human progress on the basis of individual initiative, even if they could not fully escape the influence of traditional Confucian moral values.
The radical Chinese youth of the period were nationalistic, in reaction to the aggressive imperialism of Japan and the European colonial powers in the region. They possessed a nationalist commitment to China as a sovereign nation-state in a world dominated by predatory imperialist states.
The decision of the Western powers at the 1919 Versailles peace conference to transfer German concessions in the Chinese province of Shandong to Japan was received with popular indignation in China. The radical intellectuals experienced an intellectual conversion, rejecting Western “democracies” for their sanctioning of the imperialist world order, and turning instead for inspiration to Western socialist ideas and to Marxism.
Mao Zedong, the son of a well-to-do peasant in the Southern province of Hunan, was born on December 26, 1893, in the midst of this emerging hope for a new China. As a secondary student, he wrote essays on the need for Chinese intellectuals to engage the thought of the West. In 1917, he reactivated a night school for workers, teaching a synthesis of Chinese customs and Western radicalism, in the context of a Chinese patriotic spirit.
In 1921, Mao was present at the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, established by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, professors at Peking University. The fifty-seven members of the Party were mostly students. Mao took responsibility for the recruitment of new members and organizing an alternative school in his native province of Hunan. In his continuing organizing work in his native province, Mao arrived to the conclusion that, in the context of Chinese conditions, the peasants would play a central role in the revolution, and an agrarian program would have to be pivotal to the revolutionary project. Mao was on his road toward the development of a heterodox Marxism, necessary for the conditions of China.
As developed in practice, Mao’s heterodox Marxism involved an armed struggle that began in the countryside and moved to the cities. It stressed the political education of the peasant soldiers, and an agrarian reform program in territory controlled by the revolution. Radical intellectuals, with commitment to social and economic transformation, were the leaders of the revolutionary process.
From 1935 to 1937, in the interlude between the “Long March” and the Japanese invasion, Mao and his comrades created study groups, gave presentations and lectures, and emitted publications. Mao was actively engaged in reading and critically reflecting on the studied texts, further developing his ideas and insights. In this period, Mao arrived to the understanding that the unfolding of contradictions involving classes, political parties, and nations is central to the evolution of socialism in a given nation. Inasmuch as each country has unique contradictions, socialism will have different characteristics is different nations.
During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945, the Communist Party of China had uncontested control of the countryside. The surge of popular support for the Party during the period was based on the Party’s patriotic appeals for resistance to the Japanese occupying forces. And it was based on its agrarian reform program of rent and tax reductions for tenant farmers as well as partial land redistribution. Meanwhile, the Nationalist government was discredited by its incapacity to effectively resist the Japanese invasion and by its alliance with the landlord gentry class.
Following the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China by Mao on October 1, 1949, the revolutionary government of China initiated programs and measures that were designed to defend the needs and interests of the people, setting aside previous accommodation to bourgeois and foreign interests. Its goal was to establish greater equity in the distribution of property and in income and to increase the general standard of living through economic modernization and development. In the countryside, the landed gentry was eliminated as a class, and land was distributed to individual peasant proprietors. In addition, the commercial enterprises, banks, and industries of the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie, which was tied and subordinated to foreign capital, were confiscated without compensation and were nationalized. On the other hand, the national bourgeoisie, owners of smaller companies that represented a more autonomous form of capitalist development, were permitted to retain ownership, and they were encouraged to expand under strong state regulation that included the setting of prices and wages and control of trading. As a result of these measures, annual industrial growth between 1952 and 1957 was 16% to 18%.
Mao was guilty of idealist errors in relation to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But the revolution he led established the foundation for the emergence of China today as an emerging world power committed to socialist practice and principles in the context of a world order shaped by sustained structural crisis and imperialism in decadence.
Vietnamese Revolution
Ho Chi Minh understood that in French Indochina, there was a double axis of domination, including class exploitation of the peasants by landholders and domination by a Western colonial power. Liberation requires emancipation from both dimensions.
Ho was born on May 19, 1890, in the French protectorate of Annam. His father was a Confucian scholar of peasant origins. Ho came of age in the environment of the anti-colonial nationalist movements formed by the Confucian scholar-intellectual class. As a young man, he was involved in anti-colonial political activities, and he taught at a patriotic nationalist school. At the age of 21, he fled colonial authorities by obtaining work as a kitchen assistant on a French steamship, which enabled him to see Paris as well as various cities in Spain, Africa, and Asia. He worked at a number of working-class jobs, including servant, gardener, and newspaper vendor.
Ho arrived in Paris in 1917 at the age of 27. He immediately became politically active in the city’s significant Vietnamese émigré community, and he began to attend meetings of the French Socialist Party, where he was warmly received as an active member of the Vietnamese community of Paris. In the ideological division between social democracy and communism, Ho sided with the latter, principally because of Lenin's “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question,” which affirmed the importance of the national liberation struggles in the colonies as the first step toward the triumph of the proletarian revolution in the West.
Ho was in the Soviet Union for nine months in 1923-1924, working in the Communist International on a commission dedicated to the situation of the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. He took courses at the University of the Toilers of the East and participated in various revolutionary organizations in the Soviet Union. Ho labored to broaden the perspective of the international communist movement, so that it would clearly grasp the situation of the colonized; and he sought to broaden the perspective of the colonized, so that they would more clearly discern the importance of class struggle within the colonies.
In 1925, Ho was sent to south China as an unpaid representative of the Communist International, where he formed the Revolutionary Youth of Vietnam. He was forced to abandon China in 1927, as a result of repression by the Chinese government. He relocated to Siam in 1928, where he worked to organize communist cells in Indochina. He was the leading force in the establishment of the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong in 1930, which formed the Democratic United Front in 1936 and the Vietminh Front (League for the Independence of Vietnam) in 1941, in accordance with the popular front strategy of the Communist International. The Vietminh was established in the hidden headquarters of the Indochinese Communist Party in the small village of Pac Bo in Vietnam, not far from the Chinese border. As the leading figure of the Indochinese Communist Party, Ho was constantly being pursued by the colonial authorities, and he was compelled to spend 1934 to 1938 in exile in the Soviet Union.
Ho recognized several key facts: the industrial proletariat in Annam comprised only 2% of the population; the peasantry had revolutionary potential, because of its patriotism; and the intellectuals of the scholar-gentry class were the most politically active sector. As a consequence, Ho believed that revolutionary strategies in the colonies must be different from those of the West.
Ho believed that the full liberation of the people of Vietnam would require not only political independence from French colonial domination, but also the liberation of peasants from class exploitation by traditional Vietnamese and French colonial landholders. He understood that Third World nationalism alone, without communism, would not liberate the colonized peasant. And he discerned that peasants, while possessing an orientation toward spontaneous rebellion, were unaware of the communist understanding of history and class struggle; and therefore, the peasants needed to be organized, educated, and led to form an effective struggle.
Accordingly, Ho saw the need to disseminate the ideas of communism among the peasants, workers, students, intellectuals, and merchants of the colonies. At the same time, he grasped that the workers of the West also needed to be educated beyond what they could understand from their direct experience. He saw the need to educate Western workers and the Western communist parties on the importance of encounter and alliance with the anti-colonial struggles in the colonies, as a necessary condition for attaining their own liberation from capitalist exploitation.
When Japan capitulated in 1945, the Vietminh occupied Hanoi, and Ho declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. France sent troops to regain its former colonial possession. The French Indochina War of 1946 to 1954 was ended by the Geneva Accords, which mandated the withdrawal of French troops from the territory north of the seventeenth parallel and established international recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam ("North Vietnam”). The USA came to the support of a puppet government south of the parallel, which refused to cooperate in the coordination of elections for the reunification of Vietnam, which everyone recognized would result in Ho Chi Minh being elected as head of state.
In the period 1955 to 1959, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam reconstructed the infrastructure severely damaged by the French Indochina War and took the first steps toward the construction of a socialist society, which included a land redistribution program and the development of a significant level of state or collective ownership in manufacturing, transportation, and retail trade. The nation registered significant gains: increased agricultural production, the elimination of illiteracy, increased school and university enrollment, and a significant increase in the number of hospitals and health centers in the countryside.
When national elections did not materialize, progressive forces in the South, with the assistance of the government of the North, organized the National Liberation Front. The USA escalated its military presence in 1965, when the incapacity of the government of South Vietnam to attain legitimacy and political stability became evident. The tragic U.S. war in Vietnam, which included the barbaric massive bombing of the north, was brought to an end in 1975 with the occupation of Saigon by the army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and by the military wing of the National Liberation Front. A reunified Vietnam was accomplished in fact, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed.
See “The universal meaning of Vietnam: A heroic struggle for independence and socialism,” July 08, 2022; and “Imperialist wars in Vietnam: Western imperialism makes evident its decadence,” July 12, 2022.
Korean Revolution
The Korean Revolution began as a working-class struggle in the nineteenth century, but as it advanced, it entered a new stage characterized by a struggle for national liberation as well as class emancipation. The historic leader of the Korean Revolution, Kim Il Sung, embarked on the revolutionary struggle in the 1920s, a time in which the struggle of the working class and the liberation struggles of the peoples in the colonies and semi- colonies were intensified. The situation was complex, in that an anti-imperialist, national liberation movement against Japanese imperialism existed alongside an anti-feudal democratic revolution. There was flunkeyism, in which lackeys dreamed of independence through dependence on foreign forces. And communist groups competed for the recognition of the Communist International. At the same time, many intellectuals mechanically imitated theories based on the experiences of others, without taking into account conditions in Korea. Moreover, the communists and nationalists did not educate, organize, and inspire the people; they were divorced from the masses, and they divided the masses through sectoral conflict.4
These political and ideological conditions made necessary the formulation of a new theory, leading Kim Il Sung to create what is known as the Juche idea. Kim was well-versed in Marxism-Leninism, but he led the people toward a new phase of struggle based in the Juche idea. He explained the principles of the Juche idea, as initially formulated, at the Meeting of Leading Personnel of the Young Communist League and the Anti-Imperialist Youth League held in Kalun in June 1930. The idea was further developed on the basis of reflection on the experiences of the revolutionary struggle during the subsequent fifty years.
The Juche idea sees the human being as the master of the world and of human destiny. The human being transforms the material world and shapes it, in accordance with human interests and desires. The human attitude is to change the world in accordance with human interests, so that the world can better serve human needs. The human being is superior to other species, because humans use cognition and brain capacity to change the world so that it serves them.
The Juche idea sees the human being as a social being, with independence, creativity, and consciousness. As an independent being, humans strive to throw off the fetters of social subjugation, outdated ideas, and nature. As a creative being, humans transform the world and shape their destiny, creatively changing the world to make it more in accordance their interests and desires. And humans have consciousness, which involves understanding of the world and the laws of its motion and development. Independence, creativity, and consciousness enable humanity to approach the world not with fatalism but with a revolutionary transformative spirit; not passively but actively; and not blindly, but with consciousness and purpose, in order to reshape the world.
In the conception of the Juche idea, the masses of people are the subject of history and the motive force of social, scientific, and technological progress. History develops through the struggle of the masses to creatively transform nature and society, who struggle to replace the old system with a new one more emancipatory. Social movements, which are the source of historical progress, are developed by the volitional action and role of the subject, which consists of the masses of the people.
Whereas the masses of the people are the driving force of human progress, the exploiting classes try to arrest and turn back the historical advances of the working masses. All exploiting classes constitute a reaction against history, according to the Juche idea, and they are therefore the target of revolution.
In class societies, the masses of the people do not have awareness of their strength, and they are unable to unite into a political force. This incapacity to shape history, in opposition to human destiny, can be overcome through the taking of political power by the people, led by exceptional leaders and a vanguard political party, which enables the attainment of the independence for the masses of people from class exploitation and foreign domination. Old social institutions are wiped out, and new ideological and cultural conditions for an independent life are created. Only then “will people be able to hold their destiny firmly in their hands, reshape it, and live and act genuinely as human beings.” Humans can attain complete independence only when they are “free from social bondage, natural fetters, and the shackles of outdated ideas and culture.”
With the rise of socialism, humanity has reached a historic turning point. “The liquidation of the capitalist system and the establishment of a new socialist system mark a historic turning point in the development of the revolutionary struggle for independence.” With socialism, the masses are able “to hold state power and production in their hands and lead a fully independent life.”
Kim declares that the struggle today for independence has an international character. The forces of imperialism are allied on an international scale; therefore, the struggle against imperialist domination and oppression and in defense of independence must be an international undertaking. In this vein, Kim stresses the importance of economic cooperation among socialist and newly emerging nations, which also are struggling against imperialist aggression and plunder, in the defense of their national sovereignty and natural resources. They are seeking to put an end to the old economic order, in which the majority of countries are exploited and plundered by a few capitalist powers, and to establish “a new fair world economic order.” He notes that “the newly emerging countries have inexhaustible manpower resources and natural wealth and huge economic potentialities.” Therefore, “if they strengthen economic and technical cooperation and vigorously struggle with their forces united, the newly emerging countries and peoples will be able to thwart the imperialist policy of aggression and plunder, uphold their national dignity and right to survival, and achieve economic self-sufficiency and prosperity in a short period without depending on great powers.”
Central to the Juche idea is the need for the nation to establish and maintain independence in four dimensions: ideological independence, political independence, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defense.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) declared its independence in 1945, bringing to an end 35 years of Japanese colonial rule. Korea had been a unified kingdom embracing the entire Korean Peninsula for centuries. The geographical division of the peninsula at the 38th parallel was an invention of the U.S. military accepted by the Soviet Union, as a convenient point of separation between two allied but rival armies operating on the peninsula. There was an ideological division in Korea between, on the one hand, those Koreans militantly opposed to Japanese imperialism and allied with Chinese communists, who also were opposed to Japanese domination of the region; and on the other hand, those Koreans that were collaborators with Japanese and American imperialisms, both of which had similar economic projections for the region of East Asia.
The conflict between the two ideological Koreas had been unfolding since 1931, and it took the form of a military conflict in 1950. The Korean War resolved nothing. It merely converted the ideological division into a permanent geographical division. DPRK continues today on its sovereign and independent road.
Find previous commentaries on Korea in the Thematic Index.
Conclusion
We see in these examples of anti-colonial struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a common pattern involving the formulation of the synthesis of the most progressive Western ideals with traditional values and principles of the conquered peoples, forged by exceptional leaders and vanguard political parties.
We continue in the next commentary with the subsequent stage of struggle, characterized by the emergence of neocolonialism and a new form of imperialism, giving rise to new strategies of resistance.
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C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Second Edition, Revised (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1989). The Black Jacobins is a classic work originally published in 1938. C.L.R. James was from the British Caribbean colony of Trinidad.
Horacio A. López, Horacio A., Anfictionía en América: La lucha por la Patria Grande en el siglo XIX (Habana: Ediciones CEA, 2009).
Roberto Regalado, Latin America at the Crossroads: Domination, Crisis, Popular Movements, and Political Alternatives (New York: Ocean Press, 2007).
Footnote 4. Kim Jong Il, “On the Juche Idea: Treatise Sent to the National Seminar on the Juche Idea Held to Mark the 70th Birthday of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, March 31, 1982.”