The taking of state power by the people
The examples of Third World socialist vanguard states and parties
As is well known, the neoliberal project proposed and implemented the weakening of the state, in all regions of the world-economy, during the 1980s and the 1990s. However, less appreciated is the fact progressive forces during the period also weakened the state and promoted ideologies that advocated the weakening of the state, in most cases implicitly, but in some cases explicitly. In The Poorer Nations (2012, 2014), Vijay Prashad reports that there was, on the one hand, progressive support for NGOs, which took the place of the state in administering many social welfare programs, consistent with the neoliberal demand that the state abdicate its social justice functions. Although they have disguised themselves as grassroots organizations bringing empowerment to the people, NGOs for the most part are funded by large foundations distanced from the people. They give neoliberalism a community face, even as they dismember national economies and surrender to imperialist ambitions.
On the other hand, Prashad observes, there was the advocacy and development by some progressives of small, local affinity groups operating in dispersed environments, which were not anchored in actual political struggles. Such localism was different from yet ideologically consistent with anarchism, which favored the creation of autonomous domains of self-regulated activity, distanced from the state. Localism and anarchism have disdain for state power. They create local activities that cannot be applied to the entire society; they sever the link between local activities and the construction of a nation.
Thus, during the 1980s and the 1989s, the Western Left abandoned the goal of taking political power in the name of the people, which had been the historic goal of European socialism and communism and well as Chinese and Third World anti-colonial socialism. In abandoning this historic socialist goal, the Western Left ensured control from above through NGOs, combined with piecemeal concessions to dispersed mass movements, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of imperialist power.
As a result of this misguided evolution, the Western Left for the most part has not given sufficient consideration to the formation of an alternative political party or similar hierarchical organization that is based in ideological unity and a plan of action, an alternative political party that seeks the taking of political power in the name of the people. At the same time, the United States funds a democracy industry and the various careers tied to it.
In The Poorer Nations, Prashad discusses the case of China. He reviews the reforms that were initiated in 1978 under Deng, which included the relaxing of barriers to direct foreign investment, which led to skyrocketing economic growth. He notes the important fact that as China attracted foreign investment, it insisted on technology transfer, thus enabling its own development. He mentions the extensive economic relations that emerged between the USA and China, noting that Chinese manufactured goods were exported to the USA and to Walmart and other retail giants, “where the now largely underemployed US consumers drew upon personal credit lines to pacify their advertising-driven desires.” He insightfully writes, “a satanic symbiosis grew between the hardworking but underpaid Chinese workers and the underemployed but over-credited US consumers.”
Prashad notes that the satanic symbiosis, although contributing as planned to Chinese economic growth, had negative consequences for China, including an overdependence on U.S. demand as well as rising inequality within China. To correct these disadvantages, Prashad observes, China turned to increased trade with the South. The South could provide for China’s raw materials needs; and China’s investments in the South were designed to strengthen markets of the South, so that it could absorb Chinese manufactured goods. I would add that China’s foreign policy is based on an understanding that the development of the poorer countries is in the interests of the larger and stronger economies, a fundamental fact that the Western imperialist powers have never understood.
In its global initiative, Prashad notes, China has been well received by the South, inasmuch as China’s foreign policy stands in contrast to the European legacy of colonialism and imperialism. China has embraced the spirit of Bandung, of which it had been a part from the beginning.
In his description of China in The Poorer Nations, Prashad makes no mention of the Chinese political process. This is a significant and telling oversight, inasmuch as the Chinese political process is instructive for the global Left. The West has evolved from limited representative democracy; to social democratic representative democracy; to the crisis of legitimation of representative democracy, beginning in the 1970s, rooted in its failure to respond to the aspirations and needs of the peoples; and to a decadent response to the legitimation crisis, characterized by piecemeal reform controlled from above combined with conflictive, chaotic, and disorganized demands from below, from the 1980s to the present. In contrast, China has attained political stability and effective governance on the foundation of a political structure defined by: the leadership of a vanguard political party; a government controlled by people’s assemblies, elected directly and indirectly by the people; and state direction of the economy in order to promote economic productivity and to attend to the social needs of the people. I have discussed the Chinese political process in a previous commentary, “Political Structures in Socialist China,” October 8, 2021.
In the context of the issue of the neoliberal weakening of the state and the acquiescence of Western progressivism to said dynamic, an important lesson to be learned from the experience of China is the importance and the effectiveness of state planning and direction of the economy, with state ownership constituting only one form of property, in the process of socialist construction. One would think that this would have important lessons to teach for the construction of any type of modern society. But it especially has importance for Western socialists who seek, or so they claim, the construction of socialism in their own nations.
With respect to Cuba, Prashad in The Darker Nations (2007) notes that following the triumph of its revolution, Cuba maintained people’s militias as well as high levels of popular participation in revolutionary activities, which enabled the revolution to defend the nation and withstand imperialist interventions. This is true as far as it goes, but there were various other aspects of Cuban socialism that have enabled it to persist in the face of continuous imperialist intervention and attack. In The Poorer Nations (2012), which has the subtitle A Possible History of the Global South, Prashad does not mention the Cuban socialist project, apparently viewing it as not significant for either the history or the possible future of the global South.
Prashad recently visited Cuba for an international event, and being an international leftist celebrity, he was invited to appear on an hour-long news discussion television program, along with three other international visitors. In his comments, Prashad defended Cuba socialism as exemplary, pointing out its excellent system of health. In these comments, he gave the impression that he did not know well and/or did not appreciate Cuba’s alternative system of people’s democracy, which is the foundation of Cuba’s significant gains in health and education and political stability. I suspect, based on his comments in The Darker Nations with respect to Algeria in the 1960s, that Prashad has doubts concerning the Cuban political process, especially its leadership by a single vanguard political party. It is understandable that an international visitor would want to be diplomatic on Cuban television, but neither does Prashad evaluate the characteristics of the Cuban political process in The Darker Nations or in The Poorer Nations.
For more than two decades, I personally have observed in Cuba the effective working of people’s democracy, a constitutionally based system of people’s assemblies that decide, mass organizations that speak and act, and a vanguard political party that guides and educates. The system is effective in the sense that it protects and advances the political will of the people, and it maintains the authority of the people over the political process. Hardly anyone inside Cuba puts forth the thesis that the political structures are undemocratic, even in private conservations. When someone puts forth a recommendation to make the system more democratic, it does not go beyond minor revision; the system enjoys widespread legitimation. At the same time, there is a widespread perception in Cuba that multi-party representative democracy is a dysfunctional farse, a perception based on news reports that originate in the United States and that are prepared and disseminated by U.S. journalists and news agencies.
Prashad in The Darker Nations (2007), in my view, falls victims to an overapplication of the class analyses of classical Marxism. He believed that the Third World states had an incorrect ideology that was not sufficiently developed with respect to analysis of the opposed interests of distinct classes within Third World countries. He did not sufficiently appreciate the anti-neocolonial multi-class revolutionary dimension of the Third World project, historically correct and politically intelligent for the neocolonial situation. He therefore did not appreciate the capacity of the Third World project to persist in the neocolonial world-system, in spite of setbacks, enabling it to renew and to reconnect to its philosophical and political foundation during the last quarter century, advancing to unprecedented gains in theory and practice. (See “The Third World project lives: Vijay Prashad and the eclipse of hope,” February 7, 2023).
In The Poorer Nations (2012), Prashad falls victim to another erroneous tendency of the Left. Namely, idealist exaggeration of the possibilities that are implied by the fragmented demands of dispersed and chaotic social movements, which know more about what they are against than what they are for.
In the 2014 Afterword to The Poorer Nations, Prashad notes that the Global South from Below must pressure the global North and elites from the global South to abandon neoliberalism. But to do this, “the South from Below must be able to translate the million social mutinies into political power of some kind,” and especially important would be the development of platforms of regionalism in the construction of a multipolar world system. Prashad himself recognizes that the prospects for accomplishing this are not high. “Nevertheless, [he writes], this is the way of the future—the possible history of the Global South—as regional entities under pressure from social movements fashion themselves for self-governance once US power begins to drift homewards.”
Prashad further writes in the 2014 Afterword that “the only way for the transition to multipolar regionalism to occur is if the old elites are dethroned from political power by social movements that now take political power.” Correct. And I would submit that the foundation to the necessary task of taking political power in the countries of the Third World is study and consciousness of the revolutions in the eight nations where social movements have taken political power: four that arrived to power through armed struggle, and once in power, constructed people’s democracy (Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Korea); and four that arrived to power by forming alternative political parties in systems of representative democracy and that have declared that they are constructing socialism for the twenty-first century (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua in its second Sandinista phase). The Islamic Revolution in Iran also is an important example, although emerging from a somewhat different cultural and political context. Thorough and ongoing study of these eight or nine cases would be instructive for the Left, with the understanding that successful and persistent revolutions are the source of insight, but are never to be copied.
The mentioned eight or nine nations are in the vanguard of the theory and practice of the Third World project, which, as I maintained in my last commentary, is not only alive today but is more advanced than ever in both theory and practice. They are in the vanguard of the worldwide process of constructing a pluripolar world order, based on the principles of the Third World project that were formulated from the 1950s to the 1970s. They are leading the step-by-step construction of a just and sustainable world-system, that is, they are leading the transition from an imperialist neocolonial world-system to a new international order that will make the world safe for genuine democracy and socialism.
The four that have constructed political systems of people’s democracy are especially important. They have arrived to advanced understandings of: the importance of states functioning under the mandate of people’s power; the necessary role of the state in directing the economy in accordance with principles of economic productivity, thereby enabling the system to provide for human needs; and the need for cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among nations and peoples. The alternative political systems of people’s democracy—forged in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle by vanguard nations—ought to be understood. They have much to teach the world concerning functioning political structures and processes, even though few nations in the world have the political conditions, at least at present, that make possible the implementation of people’s democracy in some version.
Vijay Prashad does not discern these unfolding dynamics. He believed that the Third World project died in the 1980s, and that today we confront the challenge of constructing a new project out of a million disparate protest movements. He does not see the significance of vanguard nations in leading humanity to a transition to a new international order. Nor does he see the importance of exceptional leaders and vanguard political parties in the taking of political power by the people in particular nations.
Vijay Prashad is an important and recognized intellectual of the Left. He has done extensive work in researching texts related to the Third World project. However, like the Left in general, he does not sufficiently analyze the political-economic systems of the eight above-mentioned nations, which have declared that they are constructing socialism in accordance with the particular conditions in their nations. I submit that these eight nations are central for the continued advance of the Third World project and for making real the dream of socialism.
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