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ОглавлениеPROLOGUE
Successive Waves of the South’s Awakening
This second volume of my memoirs offers a detailed account of my activities from 1970 up to June 2014 within the successive frameworks of the IDEP, the TWF, and the joint TWF/WFA.
A large part of the material in this volume was previously published in French in 2008, which covers the period up to the beginning of the 2000s.1 I experienced the Bandung era from the inside in the exercise of my duties, first in Egypt (1957–1960), then in Mali (1960–1963). I gave an account of that period in the first volume of my memoirs.2 The exercise of my duties at the IDEP and the TWF occurred during the declining phase of the Bandung era. This report of my activities during those years testifies to this decline.
The contemporary period of the history that I experienced can be divided into three distinct periods: 1) the growth then stagnation of the Bandung era from 1955 to 1980; 2) the restoration of the new imperialist order called “liberal globalization” from 1980 to 1995; and 3) the beginning of the capitalist/imperialist system’s implosion in 1995 and the parallel beginning of renewed struggles for “another, better world,” particularly in the new “Global South.”
The title of the French edition of this volume, The South’s Awakening, reflects my view of this global history.
The twentieth century witnessed the development of an initial wave of victorious struggles to escape the hold of capitalism and/or imperialism. The victories of liberation from imperialist domination carried in themselves the potential of going beyond capitalism toward socialism.
This first wave exhausted its capacities for development, which led, beginning in the 1980s, to the restoration of a new and savage capitalist/imperialist order, almost tantamount to colonization as pillage for the peoples of the South. But the new order, inherently unstable, has already been called into question by the rise of a second wave of the South’s awakening. The challenge is more serious than ever, but is this second wave, like the first, going to occupy center stage only in the countries of the world system’s peripheries, or is it going to start the concomitant transformation of the South and the North, with advances beyond capitalism in both areas of the globalized world?
This work is considered a memoir, a personal account of my activities. But it seems useful to offer in this prologue a synthesis of my analyses of key issues, just as I did in the first volume, without which the reader would have trouble understanding the motivations behind my activities.
First, I present three concise documents that clarify my analysis of the three successive moments of the history in question: 1) Bandung and the first globalization of struggles; 2) generalized monopoly capitalism; and 3) emergence and lumpen-development. I supplement them with a brief exposé of what I understand by Maoism, understood as a form (and maybe stage) of the development of historical Marxism.
Then I offer three documents that summarize my view of the major challenges confronting humanity: 1) the agrarian question (central for the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America); 2) the democratization of societies; and 3) the ecological challenge.
These three documents will spare me much needless repetition because these questions always arise in debates on the radical left, and thus the arguments I have developed in my presentations could not disregard them. This is also true for other questions, such as “international aid,” which persistently reappears in debates, particularly in Africa. That is why I also thought it helpful to recall my arguments on these questions in various chapters of these memoirs.
BANDUNG AND THE FIRST GLOBALIZATION OF STRUGGLES (1955–1980)
This text supplements what was presented in the first volume under the title “Deployment and Erosion of Bandung.”3
The governments and peoples of Asia and Africa proclaimed in Bandung in 1955 their wish to reconstruct the world system based on the recognition of the rights of up-till-then dominated nations. This “right to development” was the foundation of that era’s globalization, implemented within a negotiated multipolar framework that was imposed on an imperialism that had to adjust to these new requirements. Bandung’s success—and not its failure as is increasingly said without thinking—lies behind a great leap forward for the peoples of the South in education and health, in the construction of a modern state, often in the reduction of social inequalities, and in the path toward industrialization. Undoubtedly the limitations of these achievements—particularly the democratic deficit of national populist governments that “gave to the people” but never allowed the people to organize themselves—must be taken into account when assessing the era.
The Bandung system was linked to two other characteristics of the postwar systems: Sovietism (and Maoism) and the welfare state of the social democratic West. These systems were certainly competing, even in conflict (although any conflicts were completely contained within limits that prevented them from expanding beyond local armed confrontations), but also, consequently, complementary. In these conditions, to speak of the globalization of struggles makes sense since, for the first time in the history of capitalism, resistance occurred in every area of the world and inside of all nations, and thereby formed an initial step toward this globalization.
The proof of the interdependence that characterized these struggles, along with the historical compromises that ensured stability in the management of such societies, was provided, conversely, by the changes that occurred after the parallel erosion in the developmental potential of the three systems. The collapse of Sovietism also entailed the collapse of the social democratic model. Its—quite real—social advances were necessary because they were the only possible way to face the “communist threat.” We can also point to the echo of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1968 Europe.
The progress in industrialization that began during the Bandung era did not result from the logic of imperialism’s deployment, but from the victories achieved by the peoples of the South. Certainly this progress fostered the illusion of “catching up” that appeared to be on the way to realization, whereas, in fact, imperialism, forced to make adjustments to the requirements of development in the peripheries, reconstructed itself around new forms of domination. The old opposition between imperialist countries/dominated countries, which was synonymous with the opposition between industrialized countries/non-industrialized countries, gradually gave way to a new opposition based on the centralization of the advantages derived from the “five new monopolies of the imperialist centers” (control over new technologies, natural resources, financial flows, communications, and weapons of mass destruction).
The achievements of the period, along with their limitations, lead us to reexamine the central question of the bourgeoisie and capitalism’s future in the system’s peripheries. This is an ongoing question since capitalism’s globalized deployment determines the fundamental inequality of the possibilities for bourgeois and capitalist development at the system’s center and periphery through the polarizing effects produced by its imperialist nature. In other words, is the bourgeoisie in the peripheries necessarily forced to submit to the requirements of this unequal development? Is it, consequently, necessarily comprador by nature? Does the capitalist path, in these conditions, necessarily lead to an impasse? Or does the margin of maneuver from which the bourgeoisie can benefit in certain circumstances (which must be specified) allow it to pursue an autonomous national capitalist development capable of advancing in the direction of catching up? Where are the limits to these possibilities? To what extent does the existence of such limits force us to characterize the capitalist choice as illusory?
Successive doctrinaire and black-and-white responses have been provided to these questions, first asserting one thing and then its opposite, always adapting ex post facto to changes that were never correctly envisioned in the first place, either by the dominant forces or the working classes. After the Second World War, the communists of the Third International described the bourgeoisie of the South as comprador. Maoism declared that the only possible path to liberation was the one opened by a “socialist revolution by stages,” led by the proletariat and its allies (the peasant classes in particular), and above all by their avant-garde mouthpiece—the Communist Party. Bandung was going to prove that this judgment was hasty, that under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, a national populist hegemonic bloc could advance development. The page turned on the Bandung era with the neoliberal offensive of oligopolistic capital from the imperialist center (the triad of the United States, Western and Central Europe, Japan). From 1980, the bourgeoisie of the South again appeared to be subjected to comprador status, clearly visible in the compulsory unilateral adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the center, in some ways the reverse of the center’s adjustment to the peripheries forced on it during the Bandung era. But hardly had this reversal occurred then, once again, in the so-called emerging countries—mainly China, but also in other countries like India or Brazil—a margin for maneuver became apparent, offering opportunities to advance on a path of national capitalist development. Analyzing the potential of these advances, as well as their contradictions and limitations, should remain the focus for debate, and need to be extended and deepened so we can construct effective strategies to coordinate struggles at local and world levels.
2. GENERALIZED MONOPOLY CAPITALISM
Contemporary capitalism is a capitalism of generalized monopolies. What I mean by that is that monopolies no longer form islands (important as they might be) in an ocean of corporations that are not monopolies—and consequently are relatively autonomous—but an integrated system, and consequently now tightly control all productive systems. Small and medium-sized companies, and even large ones that are not themselves formally owned by the oligopolies, are enclosed in networks of control established by the monopolies upstream and downstream. Consequently, their margin of autonomy has shrunk considerably. These production units have become subcontractors for the monopolies. This system of generalized monopolies is the result of a new stage in the centralization of capital in the countries of the triad that developed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Simultaneously, these generalized monopolies dominate the world economy. “Globalization” is the name that they themselves have given to the imperatives through which they exercise their control over the productive systems of world capitalism’s peripheries (the entire world beyond the partners of the triad). This is nothing other than a new stage of imperialism.
As a system, generalized and globalized monopoly capitalism ensures that these monopolies derive a monopoly rent levied on the mass of surplus value (transformed into profits) that capital extracts from the exploitation of labor. To the extent that these monopolies operate in the peripheries of the globalized system, this monopoly rent becomes an imperialist rent. The capital accumulation process—which defines capitalism in all of its successive historical forms—is consequently governed by the maximization of monopolistic/imperialist rent.
This displacement of the center of gravity of capital accumulation lies behind the continual pursuit of the concentration of incomes and fortunes, increasing monopoly rents, and captured mostly by the oligarchies (plutocracies) that control the oligopolistic groups, to the detriment of labor incomes and even the revenues of non-monopolistic capital.
In turn, this continually growing disequilibrium is itself the origin of the financialization of the economic system. What I mean by that is that a growing portion of the surplus can no longer be invested in the expansion and strengthening of productive systems and that the “financial investment” of this growing surplus is the only possible alternative for continuing the accumulation controlled by the monopolies. This financialization, which accentuates the growth in unequal distribution of income (and wealth), generates the growing surplus on which it feeds. The financial investments (or, more accurately, investments of financial speculation) continue to grow at breathtaking rates, disproportionate with the rates of “GNP growth” (which itself then becomes largely false) or rates of investment in the productive system. The breathtaking growth in financial investments requires—and sustains—among other things, the growth in the debt, in all its forms, particularly sovereign debt. When existing governments claim to pursue the goal of “debt reduction,” they deliberately lie. The strategy of financialized monopolies needs growth in the debt (which they seek and do not oppose)—a financially attractive means to absorb the surplus from monopoly rents. Austerity policies imposed to “reduce the debt,” as it is said, actually end up increasing its volume, which is the sought-after consequence.
The Plutocrats: The New Ruling Class of Obsolescent Capitalism
The logic of accumulation lies in the growing concentration and centralization of control over capital. Formal ownership can be spread out (as in the “owners” of shares in pension plans), whereas the management of this property is controlled by financial capital.
We have reached a level of centralization in capital’s power of domination, such that the bourgeoisie’s forms of existence and organization as known up to now have been completely transformed. The bourgeoisie was initially formed from stable bourgeois families. From one generation to the next, the heirs carried on the specialized activities of their companies. The bourgeoisie was built and built itself over the long run. This stability encouraged confidence in “bourgeois values” and promoted their influence throughout the entire society. To a large extent, the bourgeoisie as dominant class was accepted as such. Its access to the privileges of comfort and wealth seemed deserved in return for the services they rendered. It also seemed mainly national in orientation, sensitive to national interests, whatever the ambiguities and limitations of this manipulated concept might have been. The new ruling class abruptly breaks with this tradition. Some describe the transformation in question as the development of active shareholders (sometimes even characterized as populist shareholders) fully reestablishing property rights. This laudatory and misleading characterization legitimizes the change and fails to recognize that the major aspect of the transformation involves the degree of concentration in control of capital and the accompanying centralization of power. The new ruling class is no longer counted in the tens of thousands or even millions, as was the case with the older bourgeoisie. Moreover, a large proportion of the new bourgeoisie is made up of newcomers who emerged more by the success of their financial operations (particularly in the stock market) than by their contribution to the technological breakthroughs of our era. Their ultrarapid rise is in stark contrast with their predecessors, whose rise took place over numerous decades.
The centralization of power, even more marked than the concentration of capital, reinforces the interpenetration of economic and political power. The “traditional” ideology of capitalism placed the emphasis on the virtues of property in general, particularly small property—in reality medium or medium-large property—considered to purvey technological and social progress through its stability. In opposition to that, the new ideology heaps praise on the “winners” and despises the “losers” without any other consideration. The “winner” here is almost always right, even when the means used are borderline illegal, if they are not patently so, and in any case they ignore commonly accepted moral values.
Contemporary capitalism has become crony capitalism through the force of the logic of accumulation. The English term “crony capitalism” should not be reserved only for the “underdeveloped and corrupt” forms of Southeast Asia and Latin America that the “economists” (the sincere and convinced believers in the virtues of liberalism) denounced earlier. It now applies to capitalism in the contemporary United States and Europe. In its current behavior, this ruling class is quite close to that of the “mafia,” even if the term appears to be insulting and extreme.
The political system of contemporary capitalism is now plutocratic. This plutocracy adapts itself to the practice of representative democracy, which has become “low-intensity democracy.” You are free to vote for whomever you want, which is of no importance since it is the market and not the Congress or Parliament that decides everything. A plutocracy also adapts itself elsewhere to autocratic forms of management or electoral forces.
These changes have altered the status of the middle classes and their mode of integration into the global system. These classes are now mainly formed of wage-earners and no longer of small commodity producers as before. This transformation manifests as a crisis of the middle classes, marked by a growing differentiation: the privileged (high salaries) have become the direct agents of the dominant oligopolistic class, while the others are pauperized.
The Profiteers: The New Dominant Class in the Peripheries
The centers/peripheries contrast is not new. It has been part of the globalized expansion of capitalism from the beginning, five centuries ago. Consequently, the local ruling classes of the peripheral capitalist countries, whether independent or colonies, were always subaltern ruling classes, though still connected to their countries, drawing profits from their insertion into globalized capitalism.
There is considerable diversity in these classes, which are largely derived from those that had dominated their societies before their submission to capitalism/imperialism. The reconquest of independence often led to the replacement of these older (collaborationist) subordinated classes by new ruling classes—bureaucracies, state bourgeoisies—which were more legitimate in the eyes of the people (at the beginning) because of their association with national liberation movements. But here again, in the peripheries dominated either by the older imperialism (forms prior to 1950) or the new imperialism (from the Bandung era up to around 1980), the local ruling classes benefited from a visible relative stability. The disruptions caused by the oligopolistic capitalism of the new collective imperialism (the triad) truly uprooted the powers of all these older ruling classes in the peripheries and replaced them with a new class that I will call “profiteers.” The profiteer in question is a businessman, not a creative entrepreneur. He derives his wealth from his connections with the established government and the system’s foreign masters, whether representatives of the imperialist states (the CIA in particular) or the oligopolies. He acts as a well-paid intermediary, benefiting from an actual political rent. This is the origin of most of the wealth he accumulates. The profiteer no longer subscribes to any moral and national values whatsoever. In a caricature of his alter-ego in the dominant centers, he is interested in nothing other than “success,” in accumulating money, with a covetousness that stands out behind a supposed praise of the individual. Again, mafia-like, even criminal, behaviors are never far away.
The formation of the new class of profiteers is inseparable from the development of the forms of lumpen-development widely characteristic of the contemporary South. But the main axis of the dominant bloc is formed by this class only in the “non-emergent” countries. In the “emergent” countries, the dominant bloc is different.
The Dominated Classes: A Generalized but Segmented Proletariat
Marx rigorously defined the proletarian (a human being forced to sell his or her labor power to capital) and recognized that the conditions of this sale (“formal” or “real” to use Marx’s terms) were always diverse. The proletariat’s segmentation is not a new phenomenon. The description was more accurate for some parts of the class, like the nineteenth-century workers in the new manufacturing sector or, a better example, the Fordist factory in the twentieth century. Concentration on the workplace facilitated solidarity in common struggles and the maturation of political consciousness, but it also encouraged workerism in some historical Marxisms. The fragmentation of production resulting from capital’s strategy of implementing the possibilities offered by modern technologies, without, however, losing control of subcontracted or delocalized production, weakens solidarity and strengthens diversity in perception of interests.
Thus the proletariat seems to disappear just at the moment it has become more widespread. Forms of small, autonomous production, and millions of small peasants, artisans, and small merchants, disappear and are replaced by subcontracting work, large chain stores, etc. Ninety percent of workers, in both material and immaterial production, become, in formal terms, wageworkers. I have drawn certain conclusions from the diversification in wages. Far from being proportional to the costs of training for the required qualifications, this diversification is accentuated to the extreme. Yet this has not prevented a rebirth in the feeling of solidarity. “We, the 99 percent,” say the Occupy movements. This twin reality—capital’s exploitation of everybody and the diverse forms and violence of this exploitation—is a challenge for the left, which cannot ignore “the contradictions among the people” and yet cannot give up on moving toward a convergence of objectives. This, in turn, implies a diversity in forms of organization and action by the new generalized proletariat. The ideology of the “movement” ignores these challenges. Moving to the offensive requires an inevitable reconstruction of centers able to think about the unity of strategic objectives.
The image of the generalized proletariat in the peripheries, whether emergent or not, is different in at least four ways: (i) the progress of the “working class,” visible in the emergent countries; (ii) the persistence of a large peasantry that is, nevertheless, increasingly integrated into the capitalist market and consequently subjected to exploitation by capital, even if indirect; (iii) the extremely rapid growth of “survival” activities resulting from lumpendevelopment; and (iv) the reactionary positions of large sections of the middle classes when they are the exclusive beneficiaries of growth.
The challenge for the radical left in these circumstances is “to unite peasants and workers,” to use terms derived from the Third International, to unite workers (including the “informal” ones), the critical intelligentsia, and the middle classes in an anti-comprador front.
New Forms of Political Domination
Transformations in the economic base of the system and its accompanying class structures have changed the conditions for the exercise of power. Political domination is now expressed through a new-style “political class” and a media clergy, both dedicated exclusively to serving the abstract capitalism of generalized monopolies. The ideology of the “individual as king” and the illusions of the “movement” that wants to transform the world, even “change life”(!)—without posing the question of workers and peoples seizing power—would reinforce capital’s new methods of exercising power.
In the peripheries, an extremely caricatured form is achieved when lumpen-development confides the exercise of power to a comprador state and class of profiteers. By contrast, in the emergent countries, social blocs of a different type exercise real power, which derives their legitimacy from the economic success of the policies implemented. The illusion that emergence “in globalized capitalism and by capitalist means” will make it possible to catch up with the centers, and the limitations, in fact, of what is possible in this context, and the concomitant social and political conflicts, open the door to different possible developments, moving either toward the best (in the direction of socialism) or the worst (failure and re-compradorization).
Obsolescent Capitalism and the End of Bourgeois Civilization
The characteristics of the new dominant classes described here are not passing conjunctural phenomena. They strictly correspond to the operational requirements of contemporary capitalism.
Bourgeois civilization—like any civilization—cannot be reduced to the logic of the economic system’s reproduction. It includes an ideological and moral component: praise for individual initiative, certainly, but also honesty and respect for the law, even solidarity with the people, expressed at least at the national level. This value system ensured a certain stability to social reproduction as a whole and marked the world of political representations at its service. This value system is disappearing. Taking its place is a system without any values. Ignorance and vulgarity characterize a growing majority in this world of the “dominants.” A dramatic change of this kind heralds the end of a civilization. It reproduces what can clearly be seen from other eras of decadence. For all these reasons, I consider that contemporary oligopolistic capitalism must now be unequivocally described as obsolescent, whatever its apparent immediate successes, since the latter are completely absorbed into a path clearly leading to a new barbarism. (I refer here to my study “Révolution ou décadence?” [Revolution or Decadence], already more than thirty years old.)4
The system of generalized monopoly capitalism, “globalized” (imperialist) and financialized, is imploding right before our eyes. This system is visibly incapable of overcoming its growing internal contradictions and is condemned to pursue its mad rush. The “crisis” of the system is due to nothing other than its own “success.” The strategy used by the monopolies has always resulted in the sought-after results up to this very day: “austerity” plans, the so-called social (in fact anti-social) plans for layoffs, are still imposed, in spite of resistance. The initiative still remains, even now, in the hands of the monopolies (the “markets”) and their political servants (the governments that submit their decisions to the so-called requirements of the “market”).
Analysis of struggles and conflicts that begin with the idea of challenging imperialist domination allows us to situate the new phenomenon of the “emergence” of some countries in the South.
Yet this autumn of capitalism does not coincide with a “springtime of peoples,” which implies that workers and peoples in struggle have made an accurate assessment of the requirements, not to “end the crisis of capitalism” but to “end capitalism” (the title of one of my recent works).5 This has not happened, or not yet. The gap separating the autumn of capitalism from the possible springtime of peoples gives to the current moment of history its dangerously dramatic character. The battle between the defenders of the capitalist order and those who, beyond their resistance, can urge humanity onto the long road to socialism, viewed as a higher stage of civilization, has hardly begun. All alternatives are thus possible, the best as well as the most barbaric.
The very existence of this gap requires some explanation. Capitalism is not only a system based on the exploitation of labor by capital. It is also a system based on polarization in its development on the world scale. Capitalism and imperialism are the two inseparable faces of the same reality, that of historical capitalism. The challenge to this system developed throughout the twentieth century up to 1980, in a long wave of victorious struggles by workers and dominated peoples. Revolutions conducted under the banners of Marxism and communism, reforms conquered within the context of a gradual path to socialism, the victories of the national liberation movements of colonized and oppressed peoples, all together built relations of force less unfavorable to workers and peoples than previously. But this wave ran out of steam without succeeding in creating the conditions for its own continuation by new advances. This exhaustion then allowed monopoly capital to retake the offensive and reestablish its absolute and unilateral power, while the outlines of a new wave of challenges to the system can barely be discerned. In that crepuscular light of the night that has not yet ended and the day that has not yet begun, monsters and ghosts take shape. Whereas generalized monopoly capitalism is truly monstrous, the responses by forces of rejection are still largely nebulous.
3. EMERGENCE AND LUMPEN-DEVELOPMENT
The term “emergence” is used by various people in extremely different contexts and most often without taking the time to clearly define its meaning. Emergence is not measured by an elevated rate of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or exports, over a long period of time (more than a decade), or by the fact that the society in question has attained an elevated level in per capita GDP, as the World Bank and conventional economists view it. Emergence implies much more: sustained growth in a country’s industrial production and an increase in the ability of these industries to be competitive on the world scale.
Moreover, two further questions need to be clarified: what industries are involved and what is meant by competitive. We should exclude extractive industries (mines and fuels) that alone can, in countries well endowed by nature, produce accelerated growth without drawing in its wake all the productive activities of the country in question. Extreme examples of these “non-emergent” situations are the Gulf countries, Venezuela, and Gabon. It is also necessary to consider the competitiveness of the productive activities in the economy as well as that of the productive system as a whole, and not just the competitiveness of a select number of production units taken on their own. By means of delocalization or subcontracting, multinationals operating in countries of the South can be behind the establishment of local production units (subsidiaries of the multinationals or autonomous units) capable of exporting on the world market, which makes them competitive in the view of conventional economics. The competitiveness of a productive system depends on various economic and social factors, such as general levels of education and training of workers at all levels, and the effectiveness of all the institutions that manage the national political economy (tax system, corporate law, labor rights, credit, public support, etc.). In turn, the productive system in question should not be reduced solely to processing industries that produce manufactured goods for production and consumption (though the absence of these really means there is no productive system worthy of the name), but also includes food and agricultural production, as well as services required for the normal operation of the system (particularly transport and credit).
The concept of emergence, then, implies a political and holistic approach to the question. Therefore, a country is emergent only insofar as the policies implemented by the government aim at the objective of building and reinforcing an inward-looking economy (even if it is open to the outside) and, consequently, capable of asserting its national economic sovereignty. This complex objective implies that the assertion of this sovereignty involves all aspects of economic life. In particular, it implies a policy that makes it possible for a country to strengthen its food sovereignty as well as its sovereignty over the control of natural resources and access to them from outside its national territory. These multiple and complementary objectives are in stark contrast with those of a comprador government that is content to adjust the growth model implemented to the requirements of the dominant “liberal-globalized” world system and the possibilities offered by it.
So far, we have said nothing about the orientation of the political strategy implemented by a particular state and society: is it capitalist or moving toward socialism? Yet this question cannot be eliminated from the debate because a ruling class’s choice of orientation has major positive or negative effects on the very success of emergence. The relation between policies of emergence, on the one hand, and the accompanying social transformations, on the other, does not depend exclusively on the internal consistency of the former, but also on the degree of their complementarity (or conflict) with the latter. Social struggles—class struggles and political conflicts—do not arise from “adjusting” to the logic of the state’s project of emergence; they are a determinant of what the state does. Current experience illustrates the diversity of and fluctuations in these relations. Emergence is often accompanied by a worsening of inequalities. Yet the precise nature of these inequalities should be spelled out: do these inequalities occur in a context where a tiny minority or a larger one (the middle classes) benefit from policies pursued while the majority of workers are pauperized, or in a context where there is an improvement in the living conditions of this majority, even if the rate of growth in their income is lower than that of the system’s beneficiaries? In other words, the policies implemented can link emergence to pauperization or not. Emergence is not a status that a country achieves once and for all. It consists of successive steps—earlier ones, if successful, would prepare the way for the following ones or, if not successful, would lead to an impasse.
In the same way, the relation between the emergent economy and the world economy is itself in constant transformation and part of different overall possibilities, which could support social solidarity in the nation or weaken it. Emergence is thus not synonymous with growth in exports and the rising power of a country measured in this way. A growth in exports hinges on the growth of an internal market that has to be specified (for the working classes, the middle classes) and the former can become a support or an obstacle to the second. A growth in exports can thus weaken or strengthen the relative autonomy of the emergent economy in its relations to the world system.
Emergence is a political project, not only an economic one. An evaluation of its success is thus based on an examination of its capacity to reduce the way in which the dominant capitalist centers continue their domination, in spite of the economic successes of emergent countries measured in the terms of conventional economics. For my part, I have defined these means in terms of control by the dominant powers of technological development, access to natural resources, the global financial and monetary system, means of information, and weapons of mass destruction. I also maintain the thesis that there is indeed a collective imperialism of the triad that intends to maintain, by any means, its privileged position in the domination of the world and prevent any emergent country from challenging this domination. I conclude from this that the ambitions of the emergent countries are in conflict with the strategic objectives of the imperialist triad, and the extent of the violence in this conflict is proportional to the degree of radicalness in the challenges from the emerging countries to the privileges of the center enumerated above.
The economics of emergence also cannot be separated from the international policy of the countries in question. Do they align themselves with the triad’s politico-military coalition? Do they, consequently, accept the strategies implemented by NATO? Or do they attempt to counter them?
An authentic project of emergence is the exact opposite of one that includes unilateral submission to the requirements of the globalized capitalism of the generalized monopolies, which can only result in what I call “lumpen-development.” I am here freely borrowing the term used by the late André Gunder Frank to analyze a similar development, but in different spatial and temporal conditions. Today, lumpen-development is the result of accelerated social disintegration connected to the model of “development” (which does not deserve the name) imposed by the monopolies of the imperialist centers on the dominated societies of the periphery. It is reflected in the dramatic growth in survival activities (the so-called informal sphere), in other words, by the pauperization inherent to the unilateral logic of capital accumulation.
Among the experiences of emergence, some fully deserve the label because they are not part of processes of lumpen-development. In other words, in these situations, pauperization does not afflict the working classes. Instead, there is an improvement in their conditions of life, whether modest or strong. Two of these experiences are clearly capitalist: Korea and Taiwan (I will not discuss here the particular historical conditions that made possible the success of the emergence project in these two countries). Two others inherit the legacy of socialist revolutions: China and Vietnam. Cuba could be included in this group if it succeeds in surmounting the contradictions it is currently undergoing.
There are other cases of emergence connected to obvious processes of lumpen-development. India is the best example of that. Parts of that country’s situation correspond to what emergence requires and produces. There is a state policy that aims at strengthening a sizable industrial system, there is an accompanying expansion of the middle classes, there is progress in technological capacities and education, and there is a foreign policy capable of autonomy on the world scene. But there is also accelerated pauperization for the great majority—two-thirds of the society. This is an example, then, of a hybrid system that combines emergence with lumpen-development. We can even bring out the complementarity of these two faces of reality. I believe, without intending to make a huge overgeneralization, that all the other countries considered to be emergent belong to this hybrid family, whether it be Brazil, South Africa, or others. But there are also—and this is true of most other countries in the South—situations in which the elements of emergence are barely apparent while the processes of lumpen-development clearly are dominant.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF MAOISM
The “workerist” and Eurocentrist Marxism of the Second International shared with the era’s dominant ideology a linear view of history in which all societies have to pass first through a stage of capitalist development, for which colonization—in this regard “historically positive”—planted the seeds, before being able to aspire to socialism. The idea that the “development” of some (the dominant centers) and the “underdevelopment” of others (the dominated peripheries) were inseparable, like two sides of the same coin, both immanent products of capitalism’s worldwide expansion, was totally alien to it.
The polarization inherent to capitalist globalization—a major fact with significant worldwide social and political implications—calls for a perspective that leads to the surpassing of capitalism. This polarization is the basis for the possible support of large fractions of the working classes and, above all, the middle classes (whose development is itself favored by the position of the centers in the world system) in the dominant countries for social-colonialism. Simultaneously, it transforms the peripheries into a “zone of storms” (as the Chinese expression has it) in a permanent natural rebellion against the capitalist world order. Certainly, rebellion is not synonymous with revolution, but it is the possibility for the latter. Motivations for rejecting the capitalist model are not lacking, even at the system’s center, as the case of 1968, among other examples, illustrates. Undoubtedly, the Chinese Communist Party’s chosen formulation of the challenge at one time—“the countryside encircles the cities”—is consequently too extreme to be useful. A global strategy for the transition beyond capitalism toward global socialism must coordinate struggles in the centers with those in the peripheries of the system.
Initially, Lenin distanced himself from the dominant theory of the Second International and successfully led a revolution in the “weak link” (Russia), but always with the belief that this would be followed by a wave of socialist revolutions in Europe. This was a disappointed hope. Lenin then moved toward a view that gave more importance to the transformation of rebellions into revolutions in the East. But it was up to the Chinese Communist Party and Mao to systematize this new perspective.
Maoism made a decisive contribution to a comprehensive assessment of the issues and challenges the globalized capitalist/imperialist expansion represents. It allowed us to place the centers/peripheries contrast immanent to the expansion of the inherently imperialist and polarizing “really existing” capitalism at the center of the analysis, and to draw from that analysis all the implied lessons for the socialist struggle in both the dominant centers and the dominated peripheries. These conclusions have been summarized in a beautiful Chinese-style expression: “States want independence, nations want liberation, and peoples want revolution.” States—the ruling classes of all countries in the world when they are something other than lackeys and conveyors of external forces—work to enlarge their space of movement which allows them to maneuver within the (capitalist) world system and raise themselves from “passive” actors, condemned to adjust unilaterally to the dominant demands of imperialism, to “active” actors, who participate in shaping the world order. Nations—that is, historical blocs of potentially progressive classes—want liberation, specifically, “development” and “modernization.” Peoples—that is, the dominated and exploited working classes—aspire to socialism. The phrase allows us to understand the real world in all its complexity and, therefore, formulate effective action strategies. It shares the view that the transition from capitalism to world socialism will be long, very long even, and, consequently, breaks with the Third International’s concept of the “short transition.”
THREE MAJOR CHALLENGES
1. The Agrarian Question
The agrarian question is at the heart of the problems of development and democracy and other challenges confronting the societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Communist parties and national liberation movements were completely aware of this during the Bandung era. The main issue centers on the rules that regulate access to the use of agricultural land. These regulations must be formulated in a way that “includes rather than excludes,” allowing all farmers to have access to land, first condition for the reproduction of a “peasant society.” This fundamental right is certainly not sufficient. It must be accompanied by policies that allow peasant family farms to produce in conditions that ensure a marked growth in national production (in turn guaranteeing the country’s food sovereignty) and a parallel improvement in the real incomes of all peasants. Here we are talking about implementing a set of macroeconomic policies and concomitant forms of satisfactory political management, and then making sure that negotiations over the organization of systems of international trade are subject to the needs of those policies.
Partisans of the capitalist path ignore the question since for them, in principle, modernity implies private property in land. It is forgotten that this so-called modern land tenure system results from the formation of historical (really existing) capitalism, established through the destruction of “customary” systems of regulating access to the land, beginning in England and subsequently elsewhere in Europe. Access to the land in feudal Europe was based on the superposition of rights over the same piece of land: those of the peasant and other members of a village community (whether serf or free), those of the feudal lords, and those of the king. The attack on this system took the form of the “enclosures” in England, imitated in various ways in all European countries throughout the nineteenth century. Marx quite early denounced this radical transformation that excluded the majority of peasants from access to use of the land—making them into proletarian emigrants into cities by force of circumstance or into agricultural laborers or tenant farmers—which he grouped with other measures of primitive accumulation that dispossessed the producers of property or the use of the means of production or both. This accumulation by dispossession continues in the countries of the contemporary South today.
Capitalist rhetoric about itself—the “liberal” ideology—has produced a myth: the “absolute and superior rationality” of economic management based on private and exclusive property in the means of production, which includes agricultural land. The dominant discourse applies the conclusions that it believes can be drawn from the construction of Western modernity and proposes them as the only “rules” necessary for the progress of all other peoples. To make land everywhere private property in the current sense of the term, such as practiced in the capitalist centers, is tantamount to spreading the policy of “enclosures” to the entire world, that is, to hastening the dispossession of the peasantry. This process is not new. It was started and pursued during the preceding centuries of capitalism’s world expansion, particularly in the context of colonial systems. Today, the WTO only envisages accelerating this process, while the coming devastation resulting from this choice is increasingly predictable and calculable, as is the resistance of the peasants and others. Such resistance might make possible the construction of a real and authentically human alternative.
In Africa, land tenure systems are still largely based on different principles than private property. This definition, clearly, is negative—not based on private property—and consequently cannot refer to a homogeneous category. Access to the land is regulated in all human societies. But the regulations are managed either by “customary communities,” “modern communities,” or the state, or more exactly and frequently, managed by a set of institutions and practices that involve individuals, groups, and the state.
“Customary” management (expressed in terms of customary law or called as such) has always (or almost always) excluded private property in the modern sense and always guaranteed access to the land to all families rather than individuals concerned, that is, to those forming a distinct “village community” that identifies itself as such. But it has never (or almost never) guaranteed “equal” access to the land. First, it most often excluded “foreigners” (vestiges of the most frequently conquered peoples) and “slaves” (of various statuses). Further, land was unequally distributed according to membership in clans, lineages, castes, or statuses: “chiefs,” “free men,” etc. Thus there is no reason to praise these customary rights unreasonably as, unfortunately, a number of anti-imperialist nationalist ideologues do. Progress will certainly require that they be challenged.
Customary management has never—or almost never—been carried out by “independent villages.” The latter have always been part of larger state bodies, stable or changing, strong or precarious, depending on circumstances, but rarely absent. The usage rights of communities and the families of which they are composed, then, have always been limited by the rights of a state, which collects a tribute (the reason why I call the huge family of pre-modern modes of production “tributary”). These complex forms of “customary” management, different from one country and time period to another, in the best of cases, exist only in extremely degraded forms, having been subject to the onslaught of the dominant processes of globalized capitalism for at least two centuries (in Asia and Africa), and sometimes five (in Latin America).
India is probably one of the clearest examples. Before British colonization, village communities managed access to the land or, more exactly, their dominant castes—ruling classes, excluding the lower castes—did so; the dalits were treated as a class of collective slaves similar to the helots of Sparta. The imperial Mughal state and its vassals (states of the rajahs and other kings), the collectors of the tribute, controlled and exploited these communities. The British elevated the zamindars, formerly charged with collecting the tribute, to the status of “landowners,” thereby forming an allied class of large landowners, in defiance of tradition. However, they maintained the “tradition” when it benefited them; for example, by “respecting” the exclusion of dalits from access to the land! Independent India has not called this unwieldy colonial heritage into question, which lies behind the incredible poverty of the majority of the peasantry and, consequently, its urban proletariat.6 The solution to these problems and the formation of a viable peasant family economy for the majority requires, consequently, an agrarian reform in the strict sense of the term (see below for the more precise meaning of this proposal). European colonialism in Southeast Asia and that of the United States in the Philippines have resulted in similar developments. Regimes of “enlightened despotism” in the Orient (the Ottoman Empire, Mohammed Ali’s Egypt, the Shahs of Iran) also mainly substituted private property in the modern sense of the term for the traditional arrangements, thereby benefiting a new class improperly called “feudal” (by the mainstream currents of historical Marxism) recruited from the higher level officials of the government system.
Consequently, private property in land is now characteristic of the majority of agricultural land—particularly the best of it—in all of Asia outside of China, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. There remain no more than fragments of degraded semi-customary systems, particularly in the poorest regions, the ones that are the least attractive for capitalist agriculture. This structure is strongly differentiated, juxtaposing large landowners (rural capitalists), rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and the landless. There is no peasant “organization” or “movement” that transcends these acute class conflicts.
In Arab Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, the colonizers (except in Egypt) had granted to their settlers (or to the Boers in South Africa) “modern” private property, in general of the latifundia type. This heritage has certainly been eliminated in Algeria. But here the peasantry had practically disappeared, proletarianized (and turned into vagrants) by the expansion of colonial lands, while in Morocco and Tunisia, the local bourgeoisie took over the land (which was also partly the case in Kenya). In Zimbabwe, the revolution underway has challenged the colonial heritage, benefiting, in part, new, medium-sized landowners, of urban more than rural origin, and, in part, communities of poor peasants. South Africa is still not part of this trajectory. The fragments of the degraded semi-customary systems that still exist in the “poor” regions of Morocco, Berber Algeria, or in the Bantustans of South Africa, are subject to the threat of private appropriation, encouraged by forces from both inside and outside of these societies. In all these situations, the character of peasant struggles (and possibly the organizations that lead them or join forces with them) should be carefully defined: do these movements and demands represent “rich peasants,” in conflict with the direction of particular state policies (and the influence of the dominant world system on these policies), or do they represent poor peasants and the landless? Can they form an “alliance” against the dominant (so-called neoliberal) system? Under what conditions and to what extent? Can the demands—whether expressed or not—of the poor peasants and the landless be overlooked?
In subtropical Africa, the apparent continuation of “customary” systems is probably more visible. Here the colonization model was different and referred to as a “trading economy” (économie de traite). Management of access to land was left to so-called customary authorities, yet still controlled by the colonial state via authentic traditional chiefs or false ones fabricated by the administration. The aim of such control was to force the peasants to produce, beyond their own subsistence needs, a quota of products specifically for export (peanuts, cotton, coffee, cacao). The preservation of a land tenure system that did not include private property was the result of colonization since no land rent entered into the composition of the prices for the designated products. This system resulted in soil mismanagement, destroyed, sometimes permanently, by the extension of cultivation (as can be seen in the desertification of the groundnut-growing areas of Senegal). Once more, capitalism demonstrated that its inherent “short-term rationality” was well and truly behind an ecological disaster. The juxtaposition of subsistence food production and production for export also made it possible to pay peasants for their labor at rates close to zero. In these conditions, to speak of a “customary land tenure system” is to overdo it considerably. This is really a new system that preserves only the appearances of traditions, often the less valuable parts.
China and Vietnam are unique examples of a system for managing access to land that is not founded on private property or on “custom,” but on a revolutionary new right, unknown almost everywhere else: all peasants, defined as inhabitants of a village, have equal access to the land (I emphasize the term “equal”). This right is the greatest achievement of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.
In China—and even more in Vietnam, which was more thoroughly colonized—the old land tenure systems (those I have called “tributary”) were already quite eroded by capitalism. The old ruling classes of the imperial system of government largely monopolized agricultural land as private or almost private property, while capitalist development fostered the formation of new classes of rich peasants. Mao Zedong is the first—and probably the only one, followed by Chinese and Vietnamese communists—to have defined a strategy for agrarian revolution based on the mobilization of the majority of the poor, landless, and middle peasants. The victory of this revolution straightaway allowed the abolition of private land—replaced by state-owned land—and the organization of new forms of equal access to the land for all peasants. This organization has certainly passed through several successive phases, including one inspired by the Soviet model of production cooperatives. The limitations of the latter’s achievements led the two countries to return to peasant family farms. Is this model viable? Can it produce continuous improvement in production without generating surplus rural labor? Under what conditions? What state support policies are required? What forms of political management can meet the challenge?
Ideally, the model implies parallel rights: of the state as sole landowner, on the one hand, and of the usufructuary (the peasant family), on the other. The state guarantees equal distribution of village lands among all families. It prohibits any use other than family cultivation, such as renting out the land. It guarantees that the product of the investments made by the usufructuary returns to him, in the short term, through his ownership of all of the farm’s production (freely marketable, although the state guarantees it by its purchases at a minimum price) and, in the long term, through the inheritance of the usufruct by the children who remain on the farm (the emigrant, when leaving the village, loses the right of access to the land, which returns to the basket of land for redistribution). Since this is certainly about rich soils, but also small (even tiny) farms, the system is viable only as long as vertical investment (a well-organized green revolution—not the one pushed by agribusiness—without large-scale motorization) proves to be as effective in allowing an increase in production per rural farmer as horizontal investment, that is, expansion of the farm supported by intensification of motorization.
Has this “ideal” model ever been implemented? It was probably close to being implemented in China during the Deng Xiaoping era. It remains the case that, while it could produce a strong degree of equality within a village, it had never been able to avoid inequalities among communities, which were a function of soil quality, population densities, and proximity to urban markets. No system of redistribution, even via cooperatives and state marketing monopolies during the Soviet phase, was up to the challenge.
What is certainly more serious is that the system itself is subject to internal and external pressures that erode its social scope and significance. Access to credit, under satisfactory conditions for the provision of inputs, is subject to all kinds of bargaining and interventions, both legal and illegal: “equal” access to the land is not synonymous with “equal” access to better conditions of production. The popularization of “market” ideology encourages this erosion. The system tolerates (even legitimates once again) the leasing of land (tenant farming) and the use of wage labor. The rhetoric of the right—encouraged from the outside—repeats that it will be necessary to give to the peasants “ownership” of the land and to open the “market in agricultural land.” It is more than obvious that the rich peasants (even agribusiness) who aspire to increase their property, lie behind such views.
This management system that regulates peasant access to the land has up till now been undertaken by the state and its ruling party. It is clearly possible to envision a system managed by actually elected village councils. That is probably necessary because there is not really any other way to mobilize the majority opinion and reduce the intrigues of a minority who might profit from a more pronounced capitalist development. The “dictatorship of the party” has been proven to be prone to sink into careerism, opportunism, even corruption. There are social struggles underway in the rural areas of China and Vietnam. They are just as prominent elsewhere in the world. But they are mainly defensive, that is, they are committed to defending the heritage of the revolution—the equal right for everyone to the land. Such defense is necessary insofar as this heritage is more threatened than it appears, in spite of repeated affirmations to the contrary by the two governments that “state ownership of land will never be abolished in favor of private property”! But this defense today requires recognition of the right to engage in such practices through organizing those who are concerned—that is, the peasants.
Forms of organizing agricultural production and land tenure systems are too diverse throughout Asia and Africa to construct a single path for the “peasant alternative” that can work for everyone. Hence, agrarian reform should be understood as a redistribution of private property when it is considered to be too unequally distributed. This is not a matter of a “reform of the land tenure system,” since this system is still managed by the principle of ownership. Nevertheless, this reform is necessary both to satisfy the perfectly legitimate demand of the poor and landless peasants, and to reduce the political and social power of large landowners. But where it has been implemented, in Asia and Africa after the liberation from imperialist and colonial domination, it was accomplished by hegemonic non-revolutionary social forces, meaning that these reforms were not managed by the majority of poor and dominated classes, except in China and Vietnam. In the latter, there was not any “agrarian reform” in the strict sense of the term, but, as I have said, a suppression of private property in land, an affirmation of state property, and an implementation of the principle of “equal” access to land use for all peasants. Elsewhere, true reforms dispossessed only the large landowners to the ultimate benefit of middle and even (in the longer term) rich peasants, while neglecting the interests of the poor and landless. That was the case in Egypt and other Arab countries. The reform underway in Zimbabwe could very well end up with similar results. Reform is still part of the required agenda in India, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Kenya.
Even where agrarian reform is an immediate and imperative requirement, it would still be an ambiguous progress because of its longer-term significance. It reinforces attachment to “small property” that becomes an obstacle to challenging a land tenure system based on private property. The history of Russia illustrates this. Changes begun after the abolition of serfdom (1861) and stimulated by the 1905 Revolution, followed by Stolypin’s policies, had already produced a demand for property that the 1917 Revolution recognized through a radical agrarian reform. As is well known, the new small landowners were unenthusiastic about giving up their rights in favor of the unfortunate cooperatives organized in the 1930s. Another path to development based on peasant family farming, organized around generalized small property, perhaps might have been possible. It was not attempted.
But what about regions (other than China and Vietnam) where the land tenure system is not (yet) based on private property? Here we are talking about inter-tropical Africa. This is an old debate. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in his correspondence with the Russian Narodniks (Vera Zasulich, among others), Marx dared to assert that the absence of private property can be an asset for the socialist revolution, allowing the leap to a system for managing access to the land other than the one governed by private property. But he did not specify what form(s) this new system should take, with the qualifier “collective,” as true as it is, being inadequate. Twenty years later, Lenin concluded that this possibility no longer existed, eliminated by the penetration of capitalism and the accompanying spirit of private property. Is this judgment correct or not? I will not express an opinion on this question, for which my knowledge of Russia is insufficient. Still it is the case that Lenin was not inclined to give critical importance to this question, having accepted Kautsky’s view expressed in The Agrarian Question. Kautsky generalized the scope of the modern European capitalist model and concluded that the peasantry was destined to disappear due to capitalist expansion itself. In other words, capitalism would be able to “resolve the agrarian question.” This is true for the capitalist countries of the triad (15 percent of the world population), but it is false for the rest of the world (85 percent of the population). History demonstrates not only that capitalism has not settled this question for the 85 percent of the world’s population, but even that in continuing its worldwide expansion, it will not be able to settle it (except by genocide—a “beautiful” solution!). It was thus up to Mao Zedong and the Communist parties of China and Vietnam to give an adequate response to the challenge.
The question arose again in the 1960s with the independence of countries in Africa. The continent’s national liberation movements, and the states and party-states that resulted from those movements, had benefited, to varying degrees, from the support of the peasant majorities. Their natural propensity toward populism led them to imagine a specifically African path to socialism. This could probably be described as quite moderately radical in its relationship to imperialism as well as to the local classes connected to its expansion. It nevertheless posed the question of the reconstruction of peasant society in a humanist and universalist spirit. This often turned out to be strongly critical of the “traditions” that the foreign masters had attempted to use for their benefit.
All—or almost all—African countries adopted the same principle, formulated in the “state’s right to eminent domain” over all land. I am not one of those who consider this proclamation an error or that it was motivated by extreme “statism.” An examination of the real ways that the current system of managing the peasantry operates, along with its integration into the capitalist world economy, allows us to assess the scope of the challenge. The system’s management is effected by a complex system that simultaneously calls on “custom,” (capitalist) private property, and the rights of the state. The “custom” in question is degraded and serves only as decoration for the speeches of bloody dictators appealing to “authenticity,” a fig leaf they believe hides their thirst for looting and treason in the face of imperialism. The propensity to expand private appropriation encounters no serious obstacle other than the victims’ possible resistance. In some regions, well placed for cultivating rich crops (irrigated zones, truck farming in suburban areas), the land is bought, sold, and leased without any formal land title. The state’s eminent domain, the principle of which I defend, becomes a vehicle for private appropriation. The state can thus “give” the land required for setting up a tourist zone, a local or foreign agribusiness enterprise, or even a state farm. The land titles necessary for accessing the managed areas are rarely distributed with any transparency. In all cases, the peasant families that occupied these lands, and ordered to leave, are the victims of practices that are abuses of power. But to abolish the state’s eminent domain to transfer property to its occupants is not feasible in reality (it would require surveying and registering all village territories!), and insofar as it would be attempted, such an operation would allow rural and urban notables to get hold of the best parcels.
The correct response to the challenges of managing a land tenure system not based on private property (or at least one not dominated by it) requires reform of the state and its active involvement in establishing a modernized, economically effective, and (to avoid, or at least reduce inequalities) democratic system to manage access to land. The solution in any case is not a return to “custom,” which is actually impossible, and would only serve to accentuate inequalities and open the way to unbridled capitalism.
We cannot say that any of the African states have ever attempted to follow the path recommended here. Mali, the Sudanese Union, following its independence in September 1961, initiated what has been quite incorrectly called “collectivization.” In fact, the cooperatives set up were not production cooperatives. Production remained the exclusive responsibility of family farms. They were a form of modernized collective authority replacing supposed “custom” on which the colonial power had based itself. The party that took on this new modern authority had, besides, a clear awareness of the challenge and had set itself the aim of abolishing customary forms of authority—considered to be reactionary, even “feudal.” Undoubtedly, this new peasant authority, formally democratic (the leaders were elected), was in reality only as democratic as the state and party. In any case, it exercised “modern” responsibilities: assured that access to the land was “correctly” carried out, that is, without “discrimination,” managed credits, distribution of inputs (supplied by state trading entities), and marketing of the products (also, in part, delivered to state trading organizations). Nepotism and abuses of power were certainly never eradicated in this activity. But the only response to these abuses would have been progressive democratization of the state, not its retreat, as subsequently forced by liberalism (through an extremely violent military dictatorship) to the benefit of merchants (dioulas). In other areas, such as the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau (under the influence of the theories advanced by Amílcar Cabral) and Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara, these challenges were directly confronted, sometimes resulting in unquestionable advances that today are conveniently erased from public awareness. In Senegal, the establishment of elected rural collectives is a response to the principle of which I will unhesitatingly defend. Democracy is a practice that requires an unending learning process, in Europe as much as in Africa.
What the currently prevailing view understands by “reform of the land tenure system” is the exact opposite of what is required to build an authentic and prosperous peasant economy. The view propagated by the propaganda instruments of collective imperialism—the World Bank, most development agencies, but also a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) having large financial support—is that reform consists of rapidly increasing privatization of land and nothing more. The objective is obvious: creating conditions that would allow the “modern” pockets of agribusiness (foreign or local) to get hold of lands that are necessary for their expansion. But the additional production that these pockets could provide (for export or the profitable local market) will never be able to meet the challenge of building a prosperous society for everyone, which involves progress for the peasant family economy as a whole.
On the contrary, land reform designed with the aim of building a true, effective, and democratic alternative, based on thriving peasant family production, should define the state’s role (main holder of eminent domain) and the role of the institutions, as well as mechanisms for managing access to the land and the means of production. I do not rule out complex and mixed solutions, specific to each country. Private property in land could be accepted—at least where it is established and considered legitimate. Its redistribution can—or should—be reconsidered where necessary through agrarian reforms (in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya). I do not even necessarily, in all cases, rule out opening controlled spaces for the establishment of agribusiness enterprises. But the main point lies elsewhere, in the modernization of peasant family production and the democratization in the process of managing its integration into the national economy and into globalization.
I do not have a blueprint to propose here. I am satisfied highlighting some of the large problems that such a reform raises. The democratic question is the main focus of the response to the challenge we are examining. This is a complex and difficult question that cannot be reduced to the insipid rhetoric of good governance and multiparty elections. The question includes an undeniable cultural aspect: democracy pushes for the abolition of “customs” that are hostile to it—prejudices about social hierarchies, and above all the treatment of women. It includes legal and institutional components: the construction of systems of administrative, commercial, and private law that is consistent with the objectives of social construction and the establishment of adequate institutions (preferably elected!). But above all, when all is said and done, the progress of democracy will depend on the social power of its defenders. The organization of peasant movements is, in this sense, absolutely irreplaceable. It is only insofar as the peasantry is able to speak for itself that advances in the direction of what is called “participatory democracy”—as opposed to reducing the problem to the dimensions of “representative democracy”—will open up.
The question of relations between men and women is a no less essential dimension of the democratic challenge. When we speak of the (peasant) family farm, we are obviously referring to the family, which up to now, and almost everywhere, has been characterized by the structural submission of women and the over-exploitation of their labor power. A democratic transformation will not happen in these conditions without women’s organized movements.
Attention should also be focused on the question of migrations. “Customary” rights generally exclude “foreigners”—that is, all those who do not belong to the clans, lineages, and families that make up a village community—from rights to the land, or restrict access to it. Migrations caused by colonial and post-colonial development have sometimes taken on dimensions that shake up the idea of the ethnic “homogeneity” of particular regions affected by such migration. The emigrants—whether originally from outside a particular state, like the Burkinabe in Côte d’Ivoire, or, although formally citizens of the same state, of an “ethnic” origin foreign to the regions where they settled, like the Hausa in the Nigerian state of Plateau—see their rights to the land they have cultivated challenged by narrow-minded and chauvinistic political movements, which benefit from external support. To defeat such “communitarianisms” ideologically and politically, and to unequivocally condemn the para-cultural rhetoric underlying them, has become one of the imperative conditions for authentic democratic advances.
All of the preceding analyses and proposals only concern the status of property and regulations for access to the land. These questions are a major focus in debates on the future of agricultural and food production, peasant societies, and the individuals making up those societies. But they do not deal with all dimensions of the challenge. Access to the land falls short of any potential for social change if the peasant beneficiary is not able to access the necessary means of production under acceptable conditions (credit, seeds, inputs, access to markets). National policies and international negotiations that focus on defining the frameworks in which prices and incomes are determined are another component of the peasant question.
I will limit myself here to outlining two major conclusions and proposals I have reached:
We cannot accept treating agricultural and food production and the land as ordinary “commodities” and, consequently, accept the necessity of including them in the globalized liberalization promoted by the dominant powers (the United States and the European Union) and multinational capital. The agenda of the WTO, which is a direct descendent of the GATT since 1995, must purely and simply be rejected. We must seek to convince public opinion in Asia and Africa—beginning with peasant organizations, but also all social and political forces that defend the interests of the working classes and the nation, particularly the requirements of its food sovereignty, and all those who have not given up a development project worthy of the name—that the negotiations conducted within the framework of the WTO agenda will result in catastrophe for the peoples of Asia and Africa. These simply threaten to ruin more than two and a half billion peasants of the two continents, offering them no alternative other than migration into shantytowns and imprisonment in concentration camps, the construction of which has already been anticipated for these potential migrants. We cannot accept the maneuvering of the major imperialist powers (the United States and Europe) that work together within the WTO in their attack on the peoples of the South. We should be aware that these powers, who unilaterally attempt to impose “liberal” provisions on the countries of the South, always make sure to exclude themselves from such provisions by maneuvers that can only be described as systematic cheating.
Asian and African peasants were organized in the earlier stage of their peoples’ liberation struggles. They found their place in powerful historical blocs that created the right conditions for victory over the imperialism of that era. Sometimes these blocs were revolutionary (China and Vietnam) and thus had their main rural base in the majority classes of middle, poor, and landless peasants. Elsewhere, they were led by the national bourgeoisie, or the strata that aspired to be such and had their rural base in the rich and middle peasant classes, isolating the large landowners and the “traditional” leaders who were in the pay of the colonizers.
This stage has now passed. The challenge of the new collective imperialism of the triad will only be met if historical blocs are formed in Asia and Africa that are not remakes of the earlier ones. To define the nature of these blocs, as well as their strategies and immediate and longer-term objectives in these new conditions, is the challenge confronting the so-called alternative globalization movement. This challenge is much more serious than what a large number of these movements involved in current struggles could imagine. New peasant organizations exist in Asia and Africa that drive current struggles. Often, when political systems make the formation of formal organizations impossible, social struggles in the country are conducted by “movements” without leaders, or at least obvious ones. These activities and programs, when they exist, need to be analyzed more. What peasant social forces do they represent, whose interests do they defend? Is it the majority of peasants? Or is it minorities who aspire to find their place in the expansion of globalized capitalism? We should avoid quick responses to these complex and difficult questions. We should beware of condemning some organizations and movements because they do not mobilize the peasant majorities around radical programs. This would amount to ignoring the requirements for organizing broad alliances and formulating a strategy of stages. But we should also beware of subscribing to the rhetoric of “naive alter-globalization,” which often sets the tone in forums and encourages the illusion that the world is moving in the right direction solely because social movements exist. This rhetoric, it is true, emanates more from numerous NGOs—of good intentions, perhaps—than from peasant and worker organizations.
2. Electoral Democracy or Democratization of Societies?
There is no authentic democracy without social progress. Democracy is both a requirement in itself and a means for the working classes to assert their rights and demands.
Democracy in the general sense involves recognition of the legitimacy of different views of the relations between the individual and society, and the concomitant legitimacy of diverse interests and the institutions necessary to promote their implementation. As such, it is an imperative condition for human emancipation. We cannot imagine such emancipation without a concomitant emancipation of the mind. Democracy provides maximum opportunities for creativity in all areas. But democracy, in the more specific sense of a set of institutions that define and control its practices, is also a means either to facilitate or hinder the advancement of the people’s (the working/popular classes) interests. In this latter sense, we should then carefully distinguish the means of popular democracy from those of democracy reserved to the privileged. To describe democracy as “popular” could be taken for a pleonasm since demos means “people” in Greek. But the pleonasm is necessary because the democracy that the dominant ideology offers to us was designed and constructed to serve the privileged and not to promote the power of the popular classes.
An authentic democracy is inseparable from social progress. That means it must combine the requirements for liberty with the no less important requirements for equality. These two values are not necessarily spontaneously complementary, but often in conflict. When liberty is combined with property, which is placed on equal footing and sanctified by the economic system, it reduces the space for realizing demands for equality. The property in question is that of a minority; in our era, it belongs to large financial oligopolies. In these conditions, the combination of liberty and property establishes the real power of a plutocracy, reducing democracy to ritual practices without any real significance. However, equality (or at least a certain amount of less inequality) can be—and often was in contemporary history—guaranteed by the government without great tolerance for the exercise of citizen freedoms. Combining liberty and equality is the essence of the challenge that confronts us today.
The institutional democracy that the dominant ideology offers us is an obstacle to authentic democratic progress. Advances in democracy have always been produced by popular struggles, and such advances have always been more prominent in revolutionary periods.
Democracy as we know it was not—and still is not—designed to encourage the expression of grassroot demands, but rather sets up obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Dominant recent tendencies in the institutionalized practice of electoral and representative democracy openly pursue the objective of reducing what their promoters call “the excess of democracy”! The dominant ideology links democracy with “freedom of markets” (that is, capitalism) and claims that they are inseparable: there can be no democracy without markets, thus no democratic socialism is conceivable. This is a tautological and ideological—in the vulgar and negative sense of the term—expression. The history of really existing capitalism as a globalized system demonstrates that this same truncated democracy has always been only the exception and not the rule.
In the centers of capitalism, the progress of representative democracy has always been the result of popular struggles, held off for as long as possible by the power holders (property owners). It is an incontestable fact that such struggles have resulted in the expansion of suffrage (universal suffrage is recent), the strengthening of legislative power against the privileges of kings, aristocracies, and the military high command, and the legalization of limits to the freedom of property owners: labor rights, social security laws, etc.
At the level of the global capitalist system, the link between (truncated) democracy and capitalism is even more clearly without any real foundation. In the peripheries (80 percent of humanity) that are integrated into real world capitalism, democracy has never, or almost never, been on the agenda of what is possible or even desirable for the operation of capitalist accumulation. In these conditions, I will even go so far to say that democratic advances in the centers, while they were indeed the result of struggles by the working/popular classes, were no less largely facilitated by the advantages such societies procured in the world system.
Popular movements and peoples fighting for socialism and liberation from imperialism were behind the authentic democratic breakthroughs initiating a theory and practice that combine democracy and social progress. This evolution—beyond capitalism, its ideology, and the restricted practice of representative and procedural democracy—began quite early in the French Revolution. It was expressed more maturely and radically in later revolutions, in the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and some others (Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam).
I am not one of those who refrain from severely criticizing the authoritarian, even bloody, excesses and abuses that accompanied the revolutionary periods of history. Explaining the reasons for such practices neither justifies them nor reduces their destructive impact on the socialist future aimed at by these revolutions. Still, we should also keep in mind the ongoing crimes of really existing capitalism and imperialism, the colonial massacres, the crimes connected with the “preventive wars” conducted today by the United States and its allies. Democracy in these conditions, when it is not simply erased from the agenda, is hardly more than a masquerade.
Today, democracy is in decline worldwide. Within the context of generalized and globalized monopoly capitalism, democracy (even in its truncated forms) is not advancing—in reality or potentially—but, on the contrary, is in general retreat. In contemporary capitalism, electoral democracy—when it exists—is combined not with social progress but with social regression. Consequently, it is threatened with loss of legitimacy and credibility. “The market decides everything, the parliament (when it exists) nothing.” Moreover, the “war on terrorism” serves, as we well know, as a pretext to reduce democratic rights for the greater benefit of the plutocracy’s power in the era of obsolescent capitalism. People then are likely to be attracted to the illusion of retreating into “identities” of various sorts (para-ethnic and/or para-religious) that are in essence anti-democratic and a dead-end.
In the countries of the capitalist/imperialist center, the working/popular classes (and even most of the middle classes, at least potentially) certainly aspire to a more real democracy, more equality, and more solidarity and social security—job security, retirement systems, etc. It is not certain that the ideology of cutthroat competition will be accepted indefinitely. But are the peoples of the North disposed to give up the significant advantages accruing to them through plundering the entire world, which implies maintaining the peoples of the South in underdevelopment? The ecological concern for “sustainable” development should lead to a serious reconsideration of these advantages. For this very reason, it has to be said that the manifestation of this concern seldom exceeds the expression of pious wishes. Here subservience to the democratic farce is internalized by a self-described “postmodernist” discourse that, quite simply, refuses to recognize the extent of such destructive effects. The main thing lies elsewhere it is said; what do elections matter in “civil society,” where individuals have become what the liberal virus claims they are—the subjects of history—whereas they are indeed not that at all!
But the democratic farce does not work in the system’s peripheries. Here, in the “zone of storms,” the established order does not benefit from sufficient legitimacy to allow a stabilization of the society.
The persistence of “backward-looking” aspirations does not result from the tenacious “backwardness” of the peoples involved (the usual rhetoric on the subject), but from an ineffective response to a real challenge. All peoples and nations of the peripheries have not only been subjected to the fierce economic exploitation of imperialist capital, they have also, consequently, been subjected just as much to cultural aggression. The dignity of their cultures, languages, customs, and history has been denied with the greatest contempt. It is not surprising that these victims of external and internal colonialism (Native Americans) naturally link their social and political liberation with the restoration of their national dignity. But these legitimate aspirations, in turn, lead them to look exclusively to the past, hoping to find there the answers to the questions of today and tomorrow. There is a real risk of seeing the peoples’ movement of awakening and liberation trap itself into tragic impasses when the “backward-looking” approach is taken as the central axis of the sought-after renewal. This confusion, among other causes, lies behind the “religious renewal.” By that I mean the resurgence of conservative and reactionary religious and para-religious interpretations that are “communitarianist” and ritualistic. Here monotheism quite easily is wedded to “moneytheism.” I obviously exclude from my judgment religious interpretations that rely on their spiritual sense to justify taking the side of those social forces fighting for freedom. But the former interpretations are dominant, and the latter are in the minority and often marginalized. Other no-less reactionary ideological approaches compensate in the same way for the emptiness created by the liberal virus: “nationalisms” and ethnic or para-ethnic communitarianism are good examples.
In the countries of the periphery, the challenge can be taken up only if, during a long transition period (centuries long), the political systems of popular democracy successfully combine three objectives: (i) maintain and strengthen national independence in a multipolar international system based on the principle of negotiated globalization; (ii) accelerate the development of productive forces without which it is futile to speak about eradicating poverty and building a balanced multipolar world; and (iii) affirm the growing place of socialist values, particularly equality. This challenge involves three-quarters of humanity. Democracy is not a ready-made formula that simply needs to be adopted. Its realization is a continuous process, which is why I prefer the term democratization. The proposed formula—a multiparty system and elections—turns into farce and runs a serious risk that the struggle for democracy will lose legitimacy. Accepting this solution as “less bad” would trap the unsuspecting in a demoralizing impasse. Rhetorics on “good governance” and “reduction of poverty” provide no adequate response to liberalism’s destructive effects.
The struggle for the democratization of society is inseparable from the struggle to change the established government. The fight for democratization requires mobilization, organization, choice of actions, strategic vision, tactical sense, and the politicization of struggles. Undoubtedly, these prerequisites of struggle cannot be decreed in advance on the basis of sanctified dogmas. But identifying them is imperative because it is indeed a matter of defeating the system of established powers and replacing it with another one. Undoubtedly, the idea that “the revolution” will replace the power of capital straightaway with that of the people must be given up. In contrast, revolutionary advances are possible, based on new and real powers of the people that push back the power of those who will continue to defend the principles of reproducing inequality.
Abandoning the question of power is tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Believing that society can be transformed without destroying, even if gradually, the established system of power, displays the most extreme naïveté. So long as the established powers remain what they are, far from being dispossessed by social change, they are capable of co-opting it and integrating it into the strengthening—not weakening—of capital’s power. The sad diversion of ecologism, which has become a new field for capital’s expansion, bears witness to that. Evading the question of power is to place social movements in a situation that does not allow them to move on the offensive, and instead restricts them to maintaining a defensive posture and resisting the offensives of those who hold power. In sum, it is to cede the initiative to the enemy.
The movement toward socialism throughout the world, in both North and South, will invent new forms of authentic democracy. Advances must, at each stage of the struggle, include their adequate political and legal institutionalization. The reader will find examples in appendix 2 in chapter 7, “Audacity, More Audacity.”
3. Ecology and Marxism
The ecological question arises in almost all debates. This is understandable given that the scale of ecological disasters is now clearly visible. Yet these debates rarely get beyond confusion. Only a minority of movements understands that a response to the challenge demands leaving behind the logic of capitalist accumulation. The established powers quickly understood the danger and expended major, supposedly scientific, efforts—which in reality are purely ideological propaganda—to demonstrate that a green capitalism was possible. I talked about this in my analyses of the question of “sustainable” development.7 I also, in contrast, contended that the works of Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, to which I referred, illustrate the possibility of calculating (I emphasize the word calculating, that is, a quantified measure) use values, on the condition of breaking away from capitalism. François Houtart’s book (2010) dissects the hoax of “green capitalism.” John Bellamy Foster (2000) has given a masterful analysis of Marx as an ecologist.8 For these reasons, I believe it might be useful to the reader of my memoirs to know what my viewpoint is on these questions, one that I have tirelessly advocated in many debates. The text that follows is drawn from my book The Law of Worldwide Value (2010).
The viewpoint of the dominant currents in environmentalism, particularly in the fundamentalist variety, is certainly not that of Marxism, although both rightly denounce the destructive effects of “development.”
Environmentalism attributes these destructive effects to the Eurocentric and Promethean philosophy characteristic of “modernity” in which the human being is not part of nature, but claims to subject the latter to the satisfactions of its needs. This thesis entails a fatal culturalist corollary. It inspires a call to follow another philosophy that emphasizes humanity’s belonging to nature, its “mother.” With that in mind, supposedly alternative and better philosophies, such as one derived from a particular interpretation of Hinduism, are praised in opposition to so-called Western philosophy. This is ill-considered praise, which ignores the fact that Hindu society was not (and is not) different from so-called Western societies, neither concerning the use of violence (Hindu society is anything but as nonviolent as it claims to be) nor the subjection of nature to exploitation.
Marx develops his analysis on a completely different terrain. He attributes the destructive character of capital accumulation to capitalism’s logic of rationality, which is governed exclusively by the pursuit of immediate profit (short-term profitability). He demonstrates that and draws the explicit conclusions in volume 1 of Capital.
These two methods of interpreting history and reality lead to different judgments on “what must be done” to meet the challenge—the destructive effects of “development.” Environmentalists are led to “condemn progress” and thereby join the postmodernists in viewing scientific discoveries and technological advances negatively. This condemnation leads, in turn, to a method of envisaging what the future might be, which is, at the very least, not very realistic. Thus projections are made in which a particular natural resource will be exhausted (fossil fuels, for example), and then the validity of these—fatally alarmist—conclusions is generalized by the assertion that the planet’s resources are not infinite, which is certainly correct in principle, but not necessarily in terms of what can be deduced from it. Thus possible future scientific discoveries that might counter a particular alarmist conclusion are ignored. Of course, the distant future remains unknown and there will never be any guarantee that “progress” will always make it possible to find solutions to unknown future challenges. Science is not a substitute for the belief in eternity (religious or philosophical). In this context, situating the debate on the nature of the challenges and the ways to deal with them would lead us nowhere.
On the contrary, by placing the debate on the terrain cleared by Marx—the analysis of capitalism—we are able to advance in analyzing the challenges. Yes, there will still be scientific discoveries in the future on the basis of which technologies for controlling the riches of nature might be derived. But what can be asserted without fear of contradiction is that as long as the logic of capitalism forces society to exercise its choices on the basis of short-term profitability (which is implied by the valorization of capital), the technologies that will be implemented to exploit new scientific advances will be chosen only if they are profitable in the short term. Consequently, this implies that such technologies will carry an increasingly higher risk of being environmentally destructive. It is only when humanity has designed a way of managing society based on prioritizing use values instead of the exchange values associated with the valorization of capital that the conditions for a better management of the relations between humanity and nature will come together. I do say “better management” and not “perfect management.” The latter implies the elimination of the limitations to which all human thought and action are subject. The early critique of Eurocentrism that I advanced (taken up in the second and expanded edition of my book Eurocentrism) continues the work started by Marx as a counterpoint to the culturalist, postmodernist, and supposedly environmentalist, discourse.9
Environmentalists’ choice to debate these questions in a flawed theoretical context traps them, not only in theoretical, but above all in political impasses. This choice allows the dominant forces of capital to manipulate all the political proposals that result from it. It is well known that alarmism allows the societies of the imperialist triad to preserve their privilege of exclusive access to the planet’s resources and prevent the peoples of the peripheries from being able to deal with the requirements of their development—whether for good or bad. It is ineffective to respond to “anti-alarmist” views by pointing to the (incontestable) fact that they are themselves mere fabrications of the lobbies (for example, the automobile lobby). The world of capital always operates in this way: the lobbies that defend particular interests of segments of capital endlessly confront one another and will continue to do so. Lobbies for energy-intensive choices now oppose lobbies for “green” capitalism. Environmentalists will only be able to get out of this labyrinth if they understand that they must become Marxists.
