The decolonization of political theory
The decolonization of political theory
Overcoming the false idea of term limits as unconditionally democratic
The October 4 edition of the Cuban news discussion program Mesa Redonda was dedicated to the issue of cultural colonialism. I take the program as the point of departure for today’s commentary, which addresses issues raised in “Evo leads mass mobilization in Bolivia: What does division in the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) mean?” September 1, 2024.
The European conquest and colonial domination of the world from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was the culmination of a historic human tendency, beginning with the agricultural revolution in several areas of the world more than five thousand years ago. I refer to the human tendency of conquest and domination of other nations and peoples, establishing advances in civilization using the resources obtained. As a result of human technological advances in all spheres of human activity, the modern European conquest of the world was greater in depth and scope. It involved military conquest in all regions of the world, the establishment of colonial administrations, and the imposition of various systems of force labor, including slavery, to facilitate the flow of precious metals and agricultural products to the European commercial centers.
Thus, the European colonial domination of the world was a military-political-economic project. But it also was a cultural invasion, in which personal names and languages were imposed on the conquered peoples and collective historic memories of the colonized were erased.
The resistance of the colonized was present from the beginning. Many empires and nations took up arms to defend themselves against the foreign military invasion, as they had done many times in the past with previous manifestations of the human tendency for conquest. But the advanced and global character of the European conquest was going to require a more advanced form of organized, politically intelligent resistance.
An advanced level of anti-colonial resistance began in the late eighteenth century. It achieved the political independence of the colonies by the third quarter of the twentieth century. The new international post-colonial order was an achievement of both the colonizers and the colonized, in that, first, a single world-system and world-economy was consolidated, with the North Atlantic powers at the center; but secondly, the world-system recognized the sovereign equality of all nations.
However, the achievement of the colonized was incomplete. True equality had not been attained. Colonialism persisted in a subtle form, as a result of the fact that the economic structures imposed by colonialism remained essentially in place, and because of the persistent consequences of the cultural invasion. As a dimension of the continuation of cultural colonialism, political institutions and political ideas throughout the world were products of Europe. At least for most of the world. The most advanced of the anti-colonial revolutions, such as the people’s revolutions in China and Cuba, established political-economic structures of a different stamp, based in different ideas concerning the meaning and purpose of human existence, rooted in the experience of the colonized.
Therefore, cultural decolonization remains a persistent challenge, which requires a permanent struggle against cultural colonialism, even in the most advanced of the people’s revolutions. As Fidel expressed it, it is struggle waged with great ideas, seeding consciousness among the people. It is a question, it is sometimes said, of recovering historical and cultural memory.
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Exceptional leaders
In observing the most successful of the anti-colonial revolutions, the presence of exceptional leaders stands out as a common characteristic. Leaders whose capacities defy what one would think could be humanly possible. Leaders with an exceptional capacity to discern the unfolding of events in the nation and the world as well as the mechanisms of economic structures. An exceptional capacity to formulate an understanding of what can be done and what ought to be done, and to discern the art of politics. And the leaders have, moreover, an exceptional capacity to explain these dynamics to the people in a way that connects to their concrete concerns and sentiments, thus generating a following among the people that constitutes itself into a nearly unstoppable political force, convinced that it speaks not only for the people, but also in the name of truth and justice.
Such exceptional leaders have emerged in all the colonized regions. They largely came from the educated petty bourgeoisie or the upper levels of the peasantry. They were connected to the mass of the people in their life experiences, and they possessed an unbounded commitment to defending the people and their interests.
I would name the following as the exceptional leaders of the anti-colonial people’s revolutions: Toussaint, Bolívar, Zapata, Sandino, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Sukarno, Fidel, Allende, Nyerere, Nasser, Nkrumah, Chávez, Evo, and Xi Jinping. In the interests of space, I will comment on four of the leaders whom I consider to be the most outstanding, whose insights pertain to the cultural legacy of humanity.
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Toussaint L’Ouverture
The slave rebellions in the French Caribbean colony of San Domingo in the aftermath of the French Revolution would have exhausted themselves without concrete gains if it were not for the presence of an exceptional leader. 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. When the rebellion broke out, he waited to see how it would develop. After a month, determining that the rebellion was of lasting significance, he made his way toward their camps.
Toussaint quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the rebellious gangs. He 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 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 envisioned a revolutionary government in France that, guided by Jacobin values, would provide San Domingo with the capital and administrators necessary for the economic development of the country and the education of the people.
Toussaint developed a plan for economic and cultural development based on capitalist agricultural production for export, using the emancipated slaves as wage laborers. He understood that the parceling of the plantations into small plots would limit the land to subsistence production and thus would retard the development of education, transportation, and commerce. He therefore permitted the white proprietors to keep their plantations, if they paid wages to the workers, rather than forcing them to work. He confiscated the property of those proprietors who refused to comply. The workers received one-quarter of the value of what they produced. Formerly the slaves had worked from dawn to dusk, but now the workday was from 5:00 to 5:00. Employers were not permitted to whip workers.
For a brief historical 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.
In 1801, seeking to institutionalize the revolution, Toussaint appointed a committee of six to write a constitution. The proposed constitution abolished slavery; established the equal rights of all, regardless of color; and protected the property rights of the plantation owners. And it established San Domingo as an autonomous dominion within the French union, decreeing all on the island to be citizens of France. For its part, France would have the obligation to provide capital and administrators for the economic development of the island. In addition, it appoints Toussaint governor for life and gives him the authority to appoint a successor.
The lifetime appointment of Toussaint was necessary to sustain the revolution, taking into account powerful forces against it. France, the United States, Great Britain, and Spain were engaged in an inter-imperialist competition to take control of the former colony by military force. In addition, there was opposition from below, from those who wanted: to declare independence and sever ties with France, erroneously trusting the promises of cooperation of the United States and Great Britain; to set aside the policy of conciliation toward whites and to engage in vengeful violence; and/or to break up the plantations into subsistence plots. San Domingo did not have the conditions for reasonable discussion of the erroneous proposals emerging from below.
But the Jacobin government in France fell. Napoleon invaded the colony in 1802. After four months of various battles and heavy losses on both sides, Toussaint surrendered to the French. He was arrested and taken to France and died in prison on April 7, 1803.
The revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture was the first anti-colonial revolution of the modern world. It anticipated many central concepts of the anti-imperialist people’s revolutions of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including the appropriation of the concepts of the Western bourgeois revolution, adapting them to the conditions of the colonized; the principle of North-South cooperation for economic development; the importance of economic productivity; and the recognition of the social and economic rights of all citizens, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
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Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh understood that there is in the colonial situation a double axis of domination, in which both class exploitation and national domination are intertwined, and that liberation requires the transformation of both forms of domination. He believed that the full liberation of the workers of the West would require their solidarity with the Third World anti-colonial movements of national liberation.
Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19, 1890, in the protectorate of Annam in French Indochina. His father was a Confucian scholar opposed to imperial collaboration with French colonialism, and Ho as a child was socialized in the environment of the anti-colonial nationalist movement formed by the Confucian scholar-intellectual class, which was not a wealthy class, but lived at a slightly higher material level than the great majority of peasants.
Forced to flee French Indochina for his political activities in 1911 at the age of 21, Ho Chi Minh lived and worked in various parts of the world, eventually winding up in Paris, where he lived from 1917 to 1924. He attained a degree of fame as an activist in Paris for the cause of Vietnamese independence, speaking and writing under the name of Nguyen the Patriot.
Nguyen the Patriot attended meetings of the French Socialist Party, where he was received with great respect as a known leader of the city’s significant Vietnamese émigré community. French socialism was divided ideologically between social democracy and the communism of Lenin. Ho was converted to Leninism, due to his study of Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question,” which was among the documents published by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. Lenin’s essay demonstrates an advanced understanding of the colonial process, noting that the colonies provide markets, land, and raw materials for the Western imperialist powers, thereby providing material benefits that make possible concessions to workers, concessions that constitute obstacles to the development of workers’ revolutionary consciousness in the Western countries. The essay maintains that the Western proletarian revolution and the anti-colonial revolution of the colonies must unite, forming a global anti-imperialist movement. The independence of the colonies, Lenin maintained, is the first step to the triumph of the proletarian revolution in the West.
As Nguyen the Patriot participated in the international communist movement, he did so as a true delegate of the colonized peoples, challenging the movement to fulfill in practice Lenin’s thesis on the colonial question. He believed that the international communist movement ought to move to a more advanced stage of genuine internationalism, moving it beyond a context defined by the movements of Western and Eastern Europe.
In Hong Kong in 1930, as an unpaid representative of the Communist International, Ho convoked a Congress to unite the communist parties of Indochina, which resulted in the establishment of the Indochinese Communist Party. On February 18, 1930, the newly formed party issued an appeal (written by Ho) to “workers, peasants, soldiers, youth, and school students” and to “oppressed and exploited fellow countrymen” and “sisters and brothers.” The Appeal called upon these popular sectors to participate in a revolution that was both a nationalist anti-colonial revolution as well as a class revolution. It described an unfolding world revolution that “includes the oppressed colonial peoples and the exploited working class throughout the world.” It maintained that in Indochina this revolution takes the form of an anti-imperialist revolution formed by workers, peasants, students, and merchants. And the appeal notes that the French imperialists “use the feudalists and the comprador bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit our people.”
The Indochinese Communist Party grew significantly in popular support in Vietnam over the next fifteen years, as a result of the Party’s connecting the issue of national liberation to the interests of the peasants, who comprised more than 90% of the population. Its formulation of a clear program in relation to peasant interests differentiated it from the various bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties of the period.
In 1941, in response to Japanese occupation of Indochina, the Indochinese Communist Party established the Vietminh Front (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam), which sought to unite various political currents and religions in a common struggle to end Japanese occupation and French colonialism and to establish the independent nation of Vietnam. The Vietminh adopted a strategy of guerilla warfare in opposition to the Japanese occupation, and it organized mass demonstrations, acts of sabotage, boycotts, and the looting of crops destined for exportation to Japan. From 1943 to 1945, Vietminh units increasingly operated in the north, such that by June 1945 seven provinces had been liberated from Japanese troops, and guerrilla activities and popular uprisings were occurring in other provinces.
On August 29, the puppet emperor Bao Dai abdicated, presenting the imperial seal to a delegation representing the National Liberation Committee of the Viet Minh. On September 2, 1945, before a crowd of one-half million people, continually shouting “independence,” in Ba Dinh square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The independence had to be established in fact on the field of battle, and it was, first against the French, and then against the United States, culminating in the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.
Ho Chi Minh possessed a capacity to appropriate the ideas of the Russian Revolution, adapting them to Vietnamese conditions. He formulated a creative theoretical synthesis of Western communism and Vietnamese nationalism, connecting the political theory to the concrete needs of the people, especially the peasants. And he possessed a capacity to patiently explain to the people.
Ho Chi Minh was beloved by the people. In the context of the sustained struggle against French colonialist and American imperialist war, limiting his term of office could not be reasonably defended.
“Ho Chi Minh: A theoretical synthesis forged in revolutionary practice,” July 15, 2022
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Fidel
Fidel Castro was the son of a large landholder, but he was not socialized in bourgeois culture, as a result of the fact that his father and mother were from poor peasant families (in Spain and Cuba). Without formal education, the couple lived on their plantation in eastern Cuba, and they did not have contact with members of the bourgeois social class.
Fidel attended Catholic boarding schools for his primary and secondary education. He arrived at the University of Havana with a patriotic nationalist consciousness in accordance with the teachings of the Cuban revolutionary José Martí. He became a socialist during his years at the University of Havana, as a result of the teachings of some of his professors, and as a result of his independent study of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whose works were available to him in the library of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Fidel announced a new stage in the Cuban Revolution—which in his mind had begun in 1868 with the first Cuban War of Independence—when he led an assault on the Moncada military barracks. The bold action projected him to a position of leadership in the Cuban struggle for sovereignty in the context of the Cuban neocolonial republic.
I have previously attempted to summarize the various indications of exceptional leadership in Fidel’s long career as the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution:
(1) the articulation of History Will Absolve Me, at once a manifesto and a platform, that in combination with the July 26, 1953, attack on Moncada Barracks, galvanized the people;
(2) the unifying of the diverse anti-Batista tendencies as the armed struggle approached triumph;
(3) the decisive action of the triumphant revolution in defense of the people, including the Agrarian Reform Law, the literacy campaign, and the reduction of housing rents and electricity rates;
(4) the 1960 proposal to preserve strong ties with the United States, but transforming them into a mutually beneficial economic relation based in mutual respect, a proposal that was rejected by the United States;
(5) incorporation of the issue of gender equality into the fundamental principles of the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s;
(6) the unifying of the various revolutionary tendencies during the 1960s and 1970s to form a vanguard party that would lead the revolution, taking the place of Fidel’s personal authority;
(7) leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, calling for global implementation of the historic Third World project and rejecting the neoliberal project of the global powers, basing these proposals in scientific economic analysis;
(8) analysis in the 1980s of the origin of the Third World external debt, describing it as morally and politically unpayable, and calling for a debtor’s strike;
(9) the search for common ground between the Cuban Revolution and the Catholic Church (beginning in the 1980s) in Cuba and at an international level;
(10) leadership of the Cuban nation in the adjustments of the Special Period during the early 1990s;
(11) incorporation of the issue of ecology into the fundamental principles of the Cuban Revolution during the 1990s; and
(12) leading the Cuban Revolution toward participation and leadership in the process of Latin American union and integration (beginning in the late 1990s).
Fidel was the head of state in the Cuban Revolutionary government for nearly fifty years, enjoying the strong support of the people, the Party, and the institutions of Cuban civil society. Yet he proposed term-limits for the Cuban head of state in the future, in recognition of the changed conditions of Cuban revolutionary society, above all the institutionalization of the moral and political leadership of Fidel in the Communist Party of Cuba. Under these conditions, various Party leaders are capable of assuming the role of head of state, such that the establishment of term limits for the head of state would not a be detriment to the revolutionary project, and it could serve as an additional check on possible corruption of political power. Thus, the Cuba Constitution of 2019 established a limit of two five-year terms on the office of President of the Republic.
“Remembering Fidel: The formation of an exceptional leader,” November 24, 2022
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Xi Jinping
Since the declaration of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the Chinese socialist project has evolved through three stages. (1) The period of “socialist revolution and reconstruction” from 1949 to 1978, led by Mao, characterized by the consolidation of state power and the socialist transformation of agriculture and industry. (2) The period of “reform, opening, and socialist modernization” from 1978 to 2012, when agricultural and industrial enterprises, state-owned and private, were permitted to sell products to domestic and foreign markets, under state direction in accordance with a long-term development plan. The reform and opening had enormous success in unleashing economic productivity. (3) The third stage, led by Xi Jinping, was launched at the 2012 National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It has focused on reducing inequality and poverty; addressing environmental problems and corruption, which had intensified during the second stage; improving China’s process of people’s democracy; and playing a leadership role in world affairs.
Following the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) of 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping undertook a comprehensive analysis of China’s practice of socialist democracy, which led him to put forth the concept of a new stage in people’s democracy in China, a stage of “whole-process people’s democracy.” This stage is based in the structures of the people’s democracy that were developed by Chinese socialism since 1949, which includes a system of direct and indirect elections and multiparty cooperation led by the Communist Party. The new stage gives greater emphasis to the participation of the people in the political process, and it seeks to improve consultation with the people in the decision-making process. The principles of whole-process people’s democracy were most fully elucidated by Xi at a conference of the Party in October 2021 and were ratified by the Party in November 2021 at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee.
Xi Jinping has been actively engaged in formulating and implementing a Chinese foreign policy based in mutually beneficial trade among nations and respect for the sovereignty of nations. He has traveled to and received state visits from Africa, Latin America, the Persian Gulf region, Russia, and the other countries of East Asia in the implementation of this vision.
In accordance with the concepts of Chinese foreign policy, Xi Jinping proposed, at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 2021, a Global Development Initiative based on the principles of commitment to people-centered development, with attention to the special needs of developing countries. The Initiative ought to be driven by innovation, harnessing the most recent technological achievements to boost productivity, with commitment to harmony between humans and nature. Xi Jinping reiterated the principles of international relations as seen by China:
We must strengthen solidarity and promote mutual respect and win-win cooperation in conducting international relations. A world of peace and development should embrace civilizations of various forms, and must accommodate diverse paths to modernization. . . . We need to pursue dialogue and inclusiveness over confrontation and exclusion. We need to build a new type of international relations based on mutual respect, equality, justice and win-win cooperation.
Xi Jinping is the most important world leader of our times. He has presided over the continued acceleration of China’s economic development, establishing the Chinese economy as the world’s largest and most dynamic. He repeatedly formulates a concept of a new post-imperialist world order, and he seeks to expand Chinese economic relations with other nations in all regions. He currently is in his twelfth year as head of state.
“China’s Whole Process People’s Democracy,” October 27, 2023
“China and the new more just world order: Mutually beneficial trade, cooperation, and shared achievements,” February 13, 2024
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On the illogic of unconditioned term limits
Western ideas of democracy today are rooted in the eighteenth-century revolution of a rising commercial bourgeoisie against monarchical abuses of power, a revolution that sought to establish a political structure that granted power to the people. But in the case of the American Republic, the Founders also wanted to check the power of the people, out of concern with respect to the tendency of the people to allow passions to override reason, stimulated by political actors lacking in virtue. It was a phenomenon that they had observed in their times, and they took it to be a consequence of human nature, even though virtuous conduct was also based in human nature.
Accordingly, the American Constitution created an elaborate political structure that would grant the sovereignty of the people but would also check the power of the people. In the government that they created, the House of Representatives was the central body of the people. In order to ensure that it would function as the voice of the people, the framers of the Constitution established short terms of two years, thus requiring frequent reaffirmation by the people of the elected representatives and enabling their replacement by the people on a regular basis. But the power of the House and the people was to be checked by the Senate, the judiciary, and the presidential administration. The senators would be elected to six-year terms by the people indirectly; elected by the legislatures of the states, which had been elected by the people. The Federalists believed that senators would tend to be more mature and less given to passion than their House counterparts, and that they would represent their states, and not merely a voting district. The judiciary was to be appointed by the President and the Senate to life tenure, with the duty to ensure the compliance of the other branches with the Constitution; they could be removed from office through impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, if there were evidence of violation of their duties. The President was to be elected indirectly by the people, through people’s elections of electoral colleges in each state, each of which voted directly for the president.
Term limits were imposed on none of the three branches, not the House, the Senate, the Court, or the President. In fact, the framers would have seen such a proposal as contrary to the project of the Constitution. They relied on the requirement of repeated elections to ensure the voice of the people. And they considered that the structures that they created would permit the emergence of statesmen who would have much to contribute to the political process, whose virtues, such as their fidelity to the people and/or their political maturity, would be visible to the people, enabling their repeated reelection. Long serving statesmen was to serve as another check on the tendency of the people toward ill-conceived policies and laws ruled by passion.
In the United States, during the course of the twentieth century, there emerged among the people a loss of faith in the government as a true representative of the sovereignty and the interests of the people. This loss of faith was a consequence of the emergence of a fourth power, the big corporations, which the Constitutional structures were not able to check. (See “Corporate power, the fourth branch: The force that the federalist constitutional architecture could not check,” September 6, 2024). Their loss of faith was reflected in the belief of the people in direct versus indirect elections, as was indicated in the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1913), which established direct popular elections of senators; and by the gradual conversion of the Electoral College into an awkward instrument for the counting of the direct popular vote for the offices of president and vice-president. The people no longer trusted the people they elected to cast a responsible vote in senatorial or presidential elections. And the loss of faith in government was reflected in a belief in term limits, which was indicated in the twenty-second amendment, ratified in 1951, limiting the president to two terms. The sentiments among the people behind these constitutional amendments are widely dispersed and strongly held among the people.
But such lack of faith in the government does not pertain to countries in which people’s revolutions—forged by an alliance of the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the working class—have brought to power statesmen whose primary mission is to defend the people against the abuses of power by imperialist countries and local elites. In the context of anti-colonial revolution, when a people’s movement comes to power, the people see the state as their defender against powerful and corrupt forces.
Today, in the great nations of the world-system, cynical elites use the people’s idea of term limits as an ideological weapon against the anti-imperialist people’s revolution of the neocolonized regions. To the extent that the peoples of the world accept the notion of term limits in doubting their own leaders, they are victims of cultural colonialism.
The history of people’s revolutions instructs us. Whether or not terms limits promote democracy depends on the conditions in each particular nation. Term limits as necessary for democracy, regardless of conditions, is a false idea. The struggle against unconditioned term limits is a dimension of the necessary permanent struggle for cultural decolonization.
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People’s Democracy in Cuba: A vanguard political-economic system