Although many view socialism through the rigid lens of Soviet orthodoxy, it has always been a work in progress and an evolving and adaptable ideology on a global scale, says Harvard Business School Marvin Bower Associate Professor Jeremy Friedman.
In his new book, Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World, Friedman traces the history of socialism over a 40-year period in five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states didn’t strictly follow the path of the Soviet bloc, but instead created new socialist models through their own trial and error, and in doing so, demonstrated that socialism can be pragmatic and variable, Friedman writes.
“To understand how socialism changes and where it is today, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos,” Friedman says. “We must attend to history.”
In this excerpt from Ripe for Revolution, Friedman discusses how conventional thinking about socialism has evolved since the Cold War.
Book Excerpt
Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World
Jeremy Friedman
Socialist Revolution as a Global Process
During the Cold War, the nature of this international process of constructing socialism was obscured to a degree by the bipolar structure of geopolitics. As the quest for allies and political support became a zero-sum game in Moscow and Washington, DC, it became easier to view states as falling on one side or the other of the Cold War divide based on alliances, United Nations votes, or foreign policy positions. This geopolitical bipolarity was translated to the realm of domestic politics—particularly in the West, where many on the Left sought to distance themselves from the so-called free world’s Cold War adversaries, especially as anticommunists sought to use communist ties, real or imagined, to tar and discredit their political opponents.
The result was a sort of siloization of the Left. Communists were separated from other types of Marxists, as well as democratic socialists, social democrats, New Leftists, and others. This contemporary siloization, however, has been reified by many scholars writing about the Left even after the end of the Cold War. A large part of this can be explained by the difficulties involved in accessing archival resources in communist and former communist countries, as well as by the scale of the project and the languages involved in re-creating an integrated history of socialism in this period. Yet while it was certainly the case that geopolitical divisions had important effects on domestic politics in both developed and developing countries, the bipolarity of the Cold War should not prevent us from seeing socialism as a fluid and evolving project, where the doctrinal debates between various types of communist, Marxist, and non-Marxist socialists did not always impede practical collaboration.
"The world of the early twentieth century is as much a creation of the losing side in the Cold War as of the winning side."
As the Cold War itself recedes farther into the past, there has been a growing effort to put the struggle between economic systems in broader and more varied contexts. Odd Arne Westad’s magisterial volume The Cold War begins the story in the 1890s with what he calls “the first global capitalist crisis,” which affected the Left by slowing its progress toward democratic power and “produced a revitalized extreme Left.” As the rise of industrial capitalism, aided by new technologies of transportation and communication in the late nineteenth century, abetted the advent of high imperialism, so did the collapse of that imperial system create new demands and sites of contestation for systems of sovereignty and property. Adom Getachew has written about “anticolonial worldmaking,” attempts to reshape international politics in the wake of decolonization in order to transform economic relations as well as political ones. Her narrative begins with the Third International, better known as the Comintern. It was precisely this form of “anticolonial worldmaking” that frightened the neoliberal “globalists,” who, according to Quinn Slobodian, sought instead to create international institutions that would prevent new holders of sovereignty from interfering with existing forms of property. Caught in between were the developmental economists (discussed by David Engerman, Sara Lorenzini, and others) who mostly attempted to achieve economic growth in postcolonial states within the confines of the existing mid-twentieth-century international political and economic structures.
These frameworks have enabled historians to examine previously overlooked international relationships. James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung have drawn attention to what they term “alternative globalizations”—namely, programs of globalization and international exchange that are not centered on the West or the expansion of capitalism. Some scholars have focused on the foreign policies and international agendas of smaller Second World actors like Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam. Others have centered on states in the Third World, making them protagonists in the broader Cold War story and emphasizing the ways in which domestic politics shaped the roles played by international actors. Even scholars studying the former Soviet Union itself have looked for channels of influence and exchange whose impacts have endured beyond the bipolar competition. Despite these burgeoning fields of scholarship, however, it is unclear how our overall picture of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has actually changed to accommodate these attempts at “alternative globalizations” and “anticolonial worldmaking.” Are these merely vanished worlds that historians are recovering, a catalog of detours, lost causes, and foregone opportunities? Engerman has written with regard to India that, with all the outside attempts to influence India’s development strategy, their “net effect was zero.” Fredrik Logevall and Daniel Bessner have argued unambiguously that “after 1945, the United States was the most powerful nation in the world; when it wanted to, it shaped global affairs.” What, therefore, is the import of all this searching for the paths through the twentieth century that do not chart the rise of American power and the victory of neoliberalism, that do not lead to the “end of history” and the Washington Consensus?
"Ideas and policies that originated in the West were transplanted to developing world contexts, and often transformed."
The answer is that while the Soviet Union collapsed, the world of the early twentieth century is as much a creation of the losing side in the Cold War as of the winning side. Socialism did not die with the USSR. As Slobodian notes, “neoliberal globalism remains one argument among many.” Understanding the legacies of the Cold War for the post–Cold War world therefore requires not only that we analyze the political and economic competition among countries espousing different ideologies but that we examine what that competition did to those ideologies themselves. It requires breaking down the barriers between political and intellectual history and treating policy makers as producers and employers of ideas as well as policies. This has already begun on the capitalist side of the conflict. Scholars such as Daniel Ekbladh, Daniel Immerwahr, and Amy Ofner have examined how Western—and particularly American—notions of capitalist development evolved over time through the practice of economic engagement and developmental aid in the Third World. Ideas and policies that originated in the West were transplanted to developing world contexts, and often transformed; and in some cases, lessons learned found their way back to Western capitals, or at least changed the way Western countries imagined the road of capitalist development for others.
Socialism was subject to similar processes, and countries that proclaimed themselves to be socialist (and were committed to the concept of a socialist world revolution) were similarly experimental, learning and adapting as circumstances dictated. That did not mean an abandonment of their ideological commitments any more than it did for the Western countries that sought to promote capitalist development by experimenting with state planning. At the margins, the adaptive approaches of both socialists and capitalists mixed the roles of the state and the private sector such that it was not always clear whether an economy was fundamentally socialist or capitalist. Tanzanian ujamaa was a case in point. While the Canadian high commissioner in Dar es Salaam saw it as “an immunization against Maoism or Stalinism,” his British colleague in London saw it as “a very nasty weed indeed and one which will permit no other plants to thrive alongside it.” By recapturing this process of trial and error in the socialist world, we can examine how socialist models of revolution and development, like capitalist ones, were transformed by the postcolonial encounter. Sebastian Berg, writing about the Left in the United Kingdom and the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall, remarks on how even those who thought they had distanced themselves from Soviet communism found their world shaken to its core.
In reality, Berg writes, even the New Left had not completely repudiated the Soviet Union, and imagining the future of socialism necessitated reckoning with its demise. With socialism now having gained renewed support and vigor since the financial crisis of 2008, it behooves historians to trace the evolution of socialism as both ideology and practice through the attempts to implement it in varied circumstances across the world during the Cold War. This book aims to understand the history of socialism as a transnational project.
Excerpted from RIPE FOR REVOLUTION: BUILDING SOCIALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD by JEREMY FRIEDMAN, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.