By Colin Lloyd
THERE IS massive inequality between rich and poor countries. The world’s richest 350 people, with combined assets of $762 billion, own more than the annual incomes of the world’s poorest two billion people.
The G7 countries—the richest and most industrialised powers—effectively rule the world: they dominate the economy and can dictate all key political decisions to the governments of the poorest countries.
In turn, the tiny elites that run the Third World countries collaborate with the wishes of the world’s banks and businesses. These elites are agents of western exploitation, taking their cut from the proceeds, and presiding over a variety of undemocratic and even dictatorial regimes supported by their rich western backers.
Marxists call these countries semi-colonies and the system imperialism. The existence of semi-colonies, dominated economically by the rich countries but formally politically independent, means that the fight for socialism in these countries has to overcome even bigger obstacles than in developed countries.
This is because to build a socialist society, economic development is needed: you cannot get rid of poverty, illiteracy and epidemics without roads, electricity and computers. So, in the Third World, the working class is not just faced with the task of taking over and running the modem economy—it has to unblock the path economic development.
It has to combine the fight for socialism with the fight for political democracy, an agrarian revolution and real national independence. The Marxist strategy for achieving this has been labelled ‘permanent revolution’—after a slogan coined by Trotsky during the 1905 Russian Revolution.
What Trotsky meant by the word permanent is a revolution that does not stop at winning democracy, land and national liberation but combines that with the fight for socialism and working class political power. Because of the structure of global capitalism even basic rights that we take for granted in the west—like real national independence and parliamentary democracy—cannot be won without a workers’ government.
But in many Third World countries, the economic backwardness inflicted by global imperialism means the working class is a minority among the exploited population. Alongside the factory, mine and office workers who earn their living from wages there are:
The workers can’t ignore the struggles of these oppressed and exploited masses, but they will often have different immediate grievances and goals. Above all, the political expression of resistance by the peasants, shanty town-dwellers and middle classes will often be led by small businessmen or professionals (and even clerics) who genuinely want to free the country from imperialism but do not want socialism.
The classic programme of bourgeois nationalism includes:
Historically, Marxists called these bourgeois questions: not to belittle them, but because the democratic, national and agrarian struggle had been led, in 19th century Europe, by the rising bourgeoisie (capitalist class).
On their own, national freedom, parliament, and agrarian revolution will not bring socialism. They would not even begin to allow a country like Haiti to develop a modem industrial economy. To really free Third World countries from the grip of imperialism you have to confiscate the property of the imperialists and their cronies among the elites who currently run the Third World. You have to cancel the debts. And you have to spread the revolution.
Because of this, the ‘national’ bourgeoisie of the Third World countries has increasingly retreated from the struggle against imperialism. The bigger the working class became, the more the capitalists backed off from any notion of anti-imperialist revolution.
Early this century, some Third World capitalists were forced by the masses into starting a struggle—for example Kemal Ataturk’s revolution in Turkey, or Chiang Kai Shek in China. Today, most Third World capitalists are content to take a small cut of the profits of the imperialists, through the stocks and shares system.
So after World War II it was generally the middle classes that led the anti-imperialist revolts.
Anti-imperialist struggles such as the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979, democratic revolts like the struggle to bring down the Suharto dictorship in Indonesia, and land struggles such as those in Colombia or Brazil in the 1990s all necessitate an alliance between the workers, the peasants and the urban poor. Often this alliance starts out being led by middle class parties and even maverick capitalist politicians: the Chavez government in Venezuela is a good example.
But for these movements to win—to end up with anything other than replacing one local elite with another—the working class must come to the head of the alliance and win the battle to combine socialist goals and socialist methods with the tasks of the democratic revolution.
Generally, revolutionary socialists are faced with the following objections:
The middle class will argue that, to keep the antiimperialist alliance together, there must be no raising of socialist demands. They will want to win friends in liberal Western regimes. They will want to get rid of foreign multinationals only to take over the local firms themselves. They will want democracy like Britain or he USA where behind the facade of parliament and courts, big business is the real ruler.
Peasant politicians will generally argue for solutions that free rural labourers from debt, bonded labour and landlord’s rent and often for the setting up of subsidised co-operatives so that producers can have more economic clout in the world market. But they will stop short of saying: nationalise the banks and factories.
The political differences between the middle class, the peasants and the workers will also lead to differences over forms of struggle. The middle class will call mass demonstrations and even be forced into insurrection and war against the imperialists. But they will say: no strikes, no factory occupations, no land-grabs by the peasants. And they will, if the revolution succeeds, move swiftly to squash any independent organisations of workers’ power.
The peasants will seize land, burn the landlord’s property and set up local governments. But the focus of their struggle will inevitably be the countryside: this is what explains the prevalence of guerrilla tactics in peasant-dominated anti-imperialist struggles.
The workers, in contrast, are the only class that can ensure the victory of the anti-imperialist struggle because:
However, even within the workers’ movement there has been strong resistance to the idea that the workers should lead the anti-imperialist struggle and transform it into a socialist revolution. Not just from the equivalents of Tony Blair in the Third World labour movements but the Stalinist parties, as well, have always argued for a two-stage revolution.
The Stalinists argue that first, we fight for democracy and national liberation and after that socialism. Because the first stage will be bourgeois democratic, say the Stalinists, the national bourgeoisie must be in the alliance. So anything that frightens them away, like fighting for socialism, must be banned.
But every time this has been tried—from the Chinese revolution of 1927, through the Spanish revolution of 1936–7, to the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions of the 1970s or Indonesia today—it ends in bloody failure.
It ends up with the workers being forced to support the ‘anti-imperialist’ government run by the colonial bourgeoisie. It ends up with the workers voluntarily giving up the fight for their own interests. And, regular as clockwork, the workers’ unions and parties are then crushed and repressed by the new governments.
Instead of socialism being put off until after democracy is achieved, not even the full democratic and national goals are achieved. The struggle in Zimbabwe started as an anti-imperialist revolution where the workers were told to hold back on their economic demands: now the former guerrilla leaders are corrupt autocrats who rule in the interests of the Western banks.
Closer to home there is Northern Ireland. The Stalinist-influenced Sinn Fein leaders persistently refused to adopt working class methods and socialist goals as part of the anti-imperialist revolution. ‘Lets get rid of the Brits first, before we start talking about workers’ revolution’ they used to say in the 1980s. They built a pan-nationalist bloc with the Northern Ireland middle class party, the SDLP, and the Irish bourgeois government in the south. And what did it deliver—the near surrender of the IRA, the changing of the Irish constitution to renounce Eire’s claim on the North, and the demobilisation of a mass struggle that 18,000 British troops could not stamp out.
The working class in Third World countries has to be at the forefront of the democratic and national struggles. It has to build an alliance with the peasantry. It must fight for nationalisation of the land, and give to those who till it massive subsidies and modernisation programmes for agriculture, including collective and co-operative farming. It must fight for full political democracy by advancing the slogan of the Constituent Assembly.
Alongside the fight for democracy the workers and peasants must create their own democracy in the factories and fields: workers’ and peasants’ councils should form the basic units of struggle and socialists fight for these to become the organs of the government that replaces the pro-imperialist dictators and cronies.
Alongside the fight for national liberation must go a rejection of nationalism. We need internationalism—above all spreading the revolution and ensuring that national or ethnic minorities in the Third World states do not become the new oppressed once imperialism is chased away.
Anti-imperialist revolutions cannot hold onto power or achieve much progress unless they are accompanied by revolutions in the world’s rich countries. For us it is yet another argument for permanent revolution.
