Global Marxism is an engaging look at the creative breadth of Marxism in the national-liberation era, but needed more critical reflection on its limitations, argues Dominic Alexander

The revolutionary movements against (mostly) European imperialism and colonialism in the twentieth century produced a huge range of major figures whose influence reached far beyond their own countries which they led to liberation. Simin Fadaee in Global Marxism aims to remind us of these leaders and their versions of Marxism, which, she argues, remain relevant and important. Fadaee’s first concern is to absolve Marx from accusations of Eurocentrism and racism, ‘which mainly come from postcolonial approaches’, which, as an alternative to Marxism ‘have suggested a recovery of subaltern knowledges and ways of being (p.3).

To a degree, such a reaction against colonial racism was clearly a necessary part of national-liberation struggles, but folding Marx into the general European complex of racist and imperialist thinking is clearly unwarranted. Fadaee notes that any ‘overall assessment of Marx … needs to take into consideration the entire scope of his work and not just a certain period or piece of writing’. So while there are indeed a few places where Marx appears to view colonialism in a positive light, this was not his settled position, and ‘by 1856-1857 he had become a critic of colonialism’, unconditionally supporting the 1857 rising in India and the Taiping rebellion in China (p.6). It is worth adding that the revolutions of 1848-9 in Europe were a crucial turning point for Marx in his view of the trajectory of capitalism and liberal politics. The failure of the bourgeoisie to take a progressive role in these events led to a rethinking about the more optimistic side of his expectations for the historical trajectory of capitalism. As with everyone else, Marx’s thinking happened in a developing historical context.

Fadaee briefly outlines how Marx developed a rich analysis of the foundations of industrial capitalism in ‘the plunder of the entire world’ such that he ‘regarded the accumulation of capital as a globalising system that incorporates diverse forms of exploitation and oppression and is dependent on a global working class’ (p.7). Capitalism is a world system, and regardless of the differences between the different societies drawn into it, capital homogenises the world by imposing its own logic and priorities. The laws and tendencies by which capitalism functions are, in fact, universal. The cultural relativism of postcolonialism therefore mises the target: ‘postcolonial theorists’ tendency to deny that capitalism is the basis of European power, hegemony and global expansion reveals a serious flaw of culturalism in postcolonial arguments’ (p.8). Fadaee follows Vivek Chibber’s argument that ‘in order to avoid economic reductionism, postcolonial theorists have fallen into the trap of eliminating economic analysis from the picture they provide’ (p.9).

The purpose Global Marxism is, of course, to explore the importance of Marxism in some major national liberation movements, establishing that far from being ‘a rigid set of propositions’, Marxism ‘has been situated in ways that reflect local conditions and contexts of mobilisation,’ and thus is ‘a theoretical tradition can be indigenised’ (p.13). Fadaee concludes that postcolonialism is guilty of failing to provide a praxis for resisting imperialism and capitalism, and to do that Marxism is in fact necessary, and has remained necessary for struggles in the Global South. This is to the extent that for Fadaee, ‘it is in fact Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric’ because this dismisses ‘some of the most transformative movements and revolutionary projects of recent human history’ (p.22).

Post-colonial socialism

The problem is that in the account of the adaptation of Marx’s ideas to the circumstance and particular struggles, in many cases, it quickly becomes questionable how much Marxism actually survives the process. This is particularly true for Jawaharlal Nehru, a leading figure in India’s independence movement, and independent India’s first prime minister. While there’s no question that Nehru towers over twentieth-century Indian politics, Fadaee acknowledges that ‘to many, Nehru remained half-Marxist and half-liberal throughout his political career’ and also that he ‘made socialism a respectable doctrine among middle-class nationalist intellectuals’ (p.25). Rather than an Indian variant of Marxism, Nehru appears rather to have fashioned an Indian variant of social democracy. Congress rule in the immediate decades after independence, with reformist social policies, and a partly state-managed economic model, also fits broadly within a conception of social democracy as applied to an Indian context.

A good deal of the essence of Marxism was thereby lost from Nehru’s version of socialism. While accepting the ‘existence of class conflict based on economic interests’, he did ‘not believe in the revolutionary overthrow of any particular class as the only path to social transformation’, instead emphasising ‘cultural and social change which would lead to the abolishment of injustice and ignorance’ (p.32). This social-democratic agenda also included an admiration for Soviet Marxism (i.e. Stalinism), for its ability to ‘maintain the state’s autonomy and provide the platform for its economic development’ (p.33). Nehru’s India was very far in character from Stalin’s brutal regime, but liberating the Indian peasantry and proletariat from landlords and capitalists was not part of the agenda. Indeed, Nehru ‘proved no less harsh when incarcerating striking workers than the British Raj’.ⁱ

Nehru’s example remains important in India, and his decades as a democratic prime minister certainly left an important legacy, but just as social democracy ceded to neoliberalism in the West, so the Congress Party also abandoned Nehru’s reformist socialism, and the failures of the neoliberal era have clearly led to the rise of the BJP and the far right in Indian politics. It has to be wondered how far Nehru’s emphasis on nationalism above class struggle in his version of socialism contributed to this trajectory.

Nationalist class alliances

Fadaee leaves Nehru with Martin Luther King’s encomium for him that he is missed, but is ‘a living force in the tremulous world of today’ (p.45). The treatment of Nehru here is, as a whole, an uncritical one. This uncritical approach sets the tone for the consideration of the other figures, from Hó Chí Minh and Mao, to Nkrumah, Cabral, Fanon, Guevera and Marcos. All of these are fascinating subjects, without a doubt, and their importance from the liberation era to today deserves discussion. Fadaee presents general accounts of their ideas and strategies within, effectively, potted biographies of each. This has a certain educative value for those new to these histories, but there are some questionable elisions and silences.

On Mao for example, the tragic destruction of the original Communist Party in the massacres of 1927, which effectively ended mass working-class involvement in the Chinese revolution, is passed over in silence. And yet, Fadaee asserts against contrary views that ‘Mao did not reject the importance of the working class as a revolutionary force’ (p.73). Whether that is true or not in Mao’s theory, in practice, the Chinese Communist Party had to fall back upon reservoirs of peasant support, from where it built back outwards, but never regained connection to the organised working class. The completion of the revolution in 1949 was described as the ‘national bourgeois democratic revolution’, and the CCP even actively discouraged workers from taking action in support of the revolution.ⁱⁱ The revolution was a nationalist one rather than a socialist one, Fadaee even noting that the post-1949 government ‘was based on a coalition of four classes – the proletariat, the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie’ (p.76).

Mao could only square his ‘Marxism’ with the nature of the revolution he led through wholesale redefinition. Thus ‘Mao gave priority to ideology and defined classes in ideological terms rather than through exclusive refence to economic conditions’ (p.76). This, for Fadaee, is in contrast to the ‘mechanistic understanding of the base-superstructure dynamic in society’ of Marxists. However, a mechanistic approach is not, and was not necessary to a Marxist understanding of class, and was far from being the conception of class found in the writings of Marxist revolutionaries such as Lenin, Trotsky or Luxemburg.

Turning the defining of class into an issue of ideology, and treating Marxism as a pick n’ mix source of gnomic aphorisms suited Mao’s project. Emphasising ideology rather than material reality as the fundamental constituent of class, moreover, served as an ideological bootstrap for launching China into a modernisation drive that exacted a horrendous price from its population. It also, of course, justified the silencing of dissent within the Chinese state project, or as Fadaee seems to see it: ‘This way of understanding classes made it possible for Mao to emphasise class struggle within an economic class as opposed to struggle only between economic classes’ (p.77).

The centralised industrialisation drive under Mao’s rule created the base from which the Chinese Communist Party was able to engineer its stupendous rise towards becoming today’s leading industrial power. The nationalist revolution in China undoubtedly succeeded, as relatively few others have, in removing China from the grip of the Western imperial domination. No stage of its history, however, should be mistaken for socialism; all along the way, this was a ruthless system designed to extract the highest possible levels of discipline and productivity out of workers and peasants. The landlord class might have been eliminated from the countryside after 1949, but they were in effect replaced by the Party bureaucracy. Mao’s voluntaristic, idealist bastardisation of Marxism, as well as having some marked resemblances to Stalinism, was an effective ideology for a state bureaucracy to effect China’s transformation from exploited semi-colony of the West to an emerging imperial power in its own right.

Contradictions of national liberation

As a leader of a national-liberation movement, Mao was certainly an extreme case, but similar contradictions plagued all these figures, caught between the imperatives of nationalist resistance to imperialism, and, in the absence of strong nationalist bourgeoisies, the need to mobilise the mass of the poor to win the struggle against the colonial powers. This made socialism, and due to the example of the Russian Revolution, Marxism specifically, an attractive ideological resource. ‘Adapting’ Marxism to these conditions did, however, mean abandoning the primary tenet of revolutionary Marxism, which is the self-emancipation of the working class. In many countries, in Africa in particular, the working class was simply too small and undeveloped to serve as the primary revolutionary force, and if the goal was rapid national economic development, workers were not necessarily natural allies. Hence the emphasis that Fadaee finds in common with many of these figures is the appeal to culture or ideology as a unifying force.

Despite Mao’s unwarranted refashioning of class as a function of ideology, it is true that the main current of Stalinist Marxism insisted that colonies remained in feudal or pre-capitalist stages of development and therefore would have to proceed through capitalism before socialism was possible. Frantz Fanon explicitly objected to this, arguing that the question ‘whether the bourgeois phase can be effectively skipped, must be resolved through revolutionary action and not through reasoning’ (p.147). An insistence that colonised nations had to abide a predetermined set of ‘stages’ before they could hope for liberation was clearly unsupportable, so national liberation movements sought ways to overcome the supposed historical impasse.

This certainly encouraged an emphasis on ideology and culture; if material forces appeared to be working against you, perhaps sheer will could make up the difference. Unfortunately, this could lead to disasters like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or authoritarian appeals to some kind of state-socialist disciplining morality, such as Guevara’s wish to develop ‘a collective attitude to production which meant perceiving work as a social duty’ (p.162).

An altogether more positive result of similar tendencies was the drive to make Pan-Africanism a coordinated international movement. Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of independent Ghana, had been centrally involved with the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, writing the call for colonial peoples to unite. From there, he became involved in the Gold Coast independence movement, finally leading independent Ghana from 1957. In 1958, an All-African Peoples’ Conference was held in Accra, and bringing together trade unions and national-liberation activists from across the continent. This moment is still celebrated well beyond Africa as a vital moment for international liberation movements.

Nkrumah is understandably still widely admired for his contribution to all this, and is seen in a heroic light, not least because his government was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1966. Fadaee presents Nkrumah’s socialism in a particularly attractive way as ‘inseparable from African humanism and the spirit of care and solidarity that traditionally existed in Africa’ , as well as insisting on the ‘significance of the class struggle by workers and peasants for the success of the socialist revolutionary struggle worldwide’ (pp.101, 106). Nonetheless, Nkrumah’s state faced very difficult economic circumstances, and devolved into a repressive one-party state in the latter part of his rule. Trade-union militancy was suppressed as being subversive, and the loss of working-class and wider popular support undoubtedly weakened his government, and left it more vulnerable to imperialist machinations.

Amílcar Cabral was another African liberation-movement leader who remains widely admired, and was one who foresaw with some clarity the problems independent African states would face from the neo-colonial economic pressures that bedevilled Nkrumah’s Ghana. Cabral saw the emergence of ‘a domestic petit bourgeoisie’ in alliance with the ‘imperial power relations’, which prevented national development (p.123). However, he hoped that the revolutionary movement could absorb this petit bourgeoisie, and that it ‘by committing suicide and scarifying itself, would not lose but would revive itself in the circumstances of workers and peasants’ (p.125). Cabral himself was assassinated on the eve of Guinea-Bissau’s independence. In the end, the national bourgeoisies that leaders like Cabral hoped could be revolutionised into leaders of socialism became the comprador elites that have facilitated neo-colonial relations. They have enriched themselves and imperialist capitals at the expense of the African peoples Cabral had hoped they would liberate. Material relations in the end proved stronger than Pan-Africanism and these various socialisms that were unrooted in working-class organisation.

If new generations are going to finally liberate humanity from the deadly chains of imperialism and capitalism, they certainly do need to learn from the struggles of the past, but it is vital to see the flaws and mistakes in those which came earlier. Fadaee is surely correct to emphasise that Marxism should be, has been and can be adapted to the particular circumstances of societies beyond the Western imperial centres, but for all the interest these accounts hold, a more critical approach to these pasts is needed to fuel the much-needed liberation struggles of today.

i Tony Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, p.24.

ii ibid. p.10