Abstract
This special issue is dedicated to the centennial of the October Revolution and the semi-centennial of the Arusha Declaration. These two great events, for reasons intrinsic to each, left an indelible mark on world history, and continue to provoke us, challenge us, inform our thinking, and inspire our struggles for a better world in the twenty-first century.
The October Revolution was the first of its kind to provide a direct challenge to capitalism, an economic system that had evolved over half a millennium to integrate the world into a unified market, through war, pillage, slavery, and genocide. The October Revolution fired the opening shot of what was to become a deluge of socialist revolutions and national liberation struggles across the South. Its greatest feat was to navigate audaciously the unchartered waters of socialist planning and human development on the basis of equality – for workers and peasants, men and women – far beyond the duplicitous proclamations of liberal bourgeois society. And it did so under circumstances of military encirclement and isolation, starved of external solidarity. The challenges and contradictions of this process will never cease to be relevant in this new century, as capitalism stumbles on in its decrepit state, making no concessions, and threatening to draw its last card, nuclear destruction of the planet.
The other daring feat of the October Revolution was its adaptation of Marxism to conditions very different from those in which it had been born in central and western Europe, and the transformation of Marxism into a weapon of revolution and liberation for the peoples of the Russian empire, on the periphery of Europe. Russia had entered a long process of decay, unable to defend its great power status. It was an empire on a war path with imperialism but left out of the imperialist scramble, inferior economically and militarily, and comprised largely of a peasant population with only a small urban working class. New principles and strategies needed to be established for a revolutionary break to occur, and these were given by the new Bolshevik party structure, the alliance with the peasantry, and the defense of the principle of national self-determination for oppressed nations. This was the first great adaptation of Marxism to local and national conditions, and among the most brilliant to this day.
Notwithstanding the later ossification of Soviet Marxism, this revolutionary break from capitalism and resistance to imperialist war launched a new age of revolutionary struggle, setting new standards and expectations for decades to come, and spreading the seeds of revolutionary Marxism to the colonial and semi-colonial countries where the large majority of the world’s population lived. It is here that Marxism advanced as revolutionary theory in the ensuing decades, in the struggles against imperialism and colonialism. China, India, Vietnam, Iran, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America – no country or region remained untouched, transforming Marxism into a living body of thought and practice. This is also where revolution and liberation became most intricately conjoined in a universal project of sovereign equality, solidarity, development, and world peace, as expressed in mid-century at Bandung. In the non-European peripheries, revolution and liberation would have to come to terms, in a more profound way than that of the Bolsheviks, with the national aspirations of peasant societies for which imperialism had no plans other than racial domination, divide and rule, instrumentalisation of gender, and permanent super-exploitation and violence.
The relationship between revolution and liberation was nowhere unproblematic. The struggle for liberation invariably entailed – as it still does today – a search for cultural renewal and civilizational renaissance, an ideological struggle both larger and inseparable from the struggle for political and economic sovereignty. It involved a search for authenticity and the correct adaptation of ideologies to national conditions, which in turn created enduring tensions and fierce political battles, whose trajectories assumed diverse expressions across the South. The stakes were high, and failure would demand a very heavy price. In Africa, the real threat was the reduction of independence to a neo-colonial situation under the guise of African tradition. Frantz Fanon, one of the most astute theorists of the time, and among the greatest minds of the century, had decried this outcome in what he saw as ‘the pitfalls of nationalism’.
The Arusha Declaration in Tanzania was a landmark in the struggle for liberation, for it galvanized the continent at a crucial moment. Neo-colonialism was gaining a firm grip among newly independent states, while the liberation movements in Southern Africa were escalating their armed struggles against colonial and white-minority rule. The Arusha Declaration proclaimed African Socialism on the basis of African traditions, or Ujamaa, and proceeded to nationalize industries, regroup the peasantry in villages, and reaffirm its support for the liberation struggles in Southern Africa. It also transformed Tanzania, and the University of Dar es Salaam, into an epicenter of vibrant intellectual thought, with few parallels around the world. Yet, the relationship of Ujamaa to revolution remained uncertain, subject to intense contestations, succumbing eventually to the contradictions which it spawned and the general crisis and imperialist reaction of the late 1970s.
Revolution and liberation remain on the agenda of the twenty-first century. And it could not be otherwise. The revolutions and liberation struggles which erupted in the twentieth century transformed the world system, and although capitalism was not suppressed or surpassed, they established conditions hitherto unknown to historical capitalism and favorable to a new age of struggle. The capitalist system confronted an entirely new situation – a dynamic system of economic planning in the East and a global system of juridically independent states – for which it had no answer other than to set off a nuclear power struggle with the Soviet Union, by its use of the atomic bomb in Japan, and clip the wings of the new nations by a policy of economic extortion and permanent war. By the century’s end, the Soviet Union would buckle and the neocolonial system would be extended to the bulk of the South, in diverse ways and degrees, in what Kwame Nkrumah had rightly seen as the ‘last stage of imperialism’ – in his response to Lenin’s thesis on monopoly capitalism.
Among the new challenges of our age, in this final stage of imperialism, is a climate and energy crisis that threatens the very survival of humanity. This crisis is both the product of imperialism and beyond its grasp. The struggles for revolution and liberation in the twenty-first century must again respond and assume their rightful leadership in the building of a new world for the benefit of all peoples.
Overview of the contributions
This special issue brings together six contributions which address a broad spectrum of issues and problems that remain relevant today.
Samir Amin addresses one of the key dimensions confronting the revolutions of the twentieth century, with reference especially to the Russian and Chinese, that is, the agrarian question for the peasantry, which constituted the popular majority in these countries at the time of the revolutions. Two challenges are presented here. The first concerns the manner by which historical capitalism has ‘settled’ the agrarian question in favour of minorities comprising the populations of the developed capitalist economies of the centre (about 15 percent of the world’s population). Amin asks: is the reproduction of this model of ‘development’ feasible or achievable for the populations of contemporary Asia, Africa and South America? He argues that the agrarian question of the peoples of the South can only be solved by a bold vision of socialism. The second challenge concerns the strategy of stages which Amin proposes as a long-term process of constructing a socialist alternative for the populations of these three continents. As it must, the new agrarian question emerges as the key issue to be addressed in the processes of building socialism in the twenty-first century.
Prabhat Patnaik argues that the theoretical basis of the October Revolution lay in the development of Marxism. This occurred through successive rounds of theoretical debate, each stimulated by the specific Russian reality, but each having a relevance far wider than the Russian context itself, and a relevance that abides to this day. While these rounds of debate appear to be on different themes, they were concerned with the same question: must a transition to socialism in any society await the ‘completion’ in some sense of the development of capitalism in that society? And if so, then what does the term ‘completion’ mean in this context? This essay explores the challenges of the worker-peasant alliance and imperialism at the time of the October Revolution, and seeks to provide answers to the question of what sort of revolutionary strategy is necessary to achieve the transition to socialism.
Issa Shivji argues that the October Revolution set in motion two lineages in the struggle against imperialism. One lineage traces its ancestry directly to October and its Marxist leader V.I. Lenin, and includes the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions. The second lineage is that of national liberation movements in the former colonised countries of Africa and Asia. Tanzania’s independence movement, under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, was one such national-popular movement that questioned both capitalism and imperialism with its blueprint called the Arusha Declaration: Policy of Socialism and Self-reliance, proclaimed in 1967. This declaration gave substance to Ujamaa, the socialist approach sought by Nyerere in accordance with African traditions. Shivji considers Nyerere’s philosophical and political outlook, and his contentious relationship with Marxism. He also documents the intellectual history of Marxist ideas in Tanzania and the struggles around Ujamaa.
Wilson N. Barbosa traces the worldwide impact of the October Revolution and its contribution to the awakening of the masses in Europe and the peripheries, in the course of the twentieth century. He highlights the unprecedented space for maneuver that the October Revolution created for other revolutions and liberations struggles, but also the character of the imperialist counter-offensive launched in response. Barbosa argues for the ongoing relevance of Leninism in the struggle against imperialism and elaborates the teachings of Leninism and its unique organizational power in the interest of long-term struggle.
Malini Bhattacharya traces the manner in which the October Revolution impacted the Indian Freedom Struggle. She argues that not only did it play a catalytic role in the formation of the Indian Communist Party and eventually help the transformation of a number of freedom fighters into communists, but it also initiated debates and discussions regarding the relevance of this great political upheaval to the Indian situation, even among thinkers and intellectuals who had not been converted to socialist thinking. This essay documents, in particular, the impact of the Russian revolution on the Bengali intelligentsia involved in the freedom struggle. Bhattacharya throws light on one episode in this complex intellectual history, which evolved in many different ways in different parts of India, that is, Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Soviet Russia in 1930. Bhattacharya assesses the impact of the ideas unleashed by the revolution on the intellectuals in Bengal and shows that the ensuing debates were innovative, far from merely derivative of the Russian experience.
Minqi Li turns to the twenty-first century, and the unfolding crisis, which is economic, political, and environmental. He argues that what will happen between now and mid-century may shape and largely determine the future of humanity for centuries to come. His article reevaluates the trajectory of twentieth-century socialism and identifies its legacies, before considering the unique character of contemporary contradictions, marked by the expansion of the world’s labour force and the acceleration of climate change. He argues, in particular, that the formation of new industrial working classes may fatally undermine the system’s political legitimacy and raise again the ‘specter of communism’ which Marx and Engels had predicted, this time not only in Europe but over the entire globe.