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The era of
Bandung (1955-1975)
An assessment
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More than 30
years ago the principal heads of state of those Asian and African
countries that had regained political independence met for the first
time at Bandung. The experience of the new authorities they represented
was still slight: India and Indonesia had been independent for fewer
than ten years; Communist China for only five, and it was only three
years since the Egyptian monarchy had bowed out of history. The battle
for the achievement of the historic task of independence was not over:
the first Vietnamese war was only just finished and the second was
already in prospect, the Korean War ended with the status quo, the
Algerian war was in full flow, decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa was
not even yet foreseen, and the drama of Palestine was in its first
phase.
The Asian and
African leaders meeting in Bandung were far from resembling one another.
The political and ideological currents they represented, their vision of
the future society to be built or rebuilt and its relations with the
West all provoked different attitudes. But a common plan brought them
together and gave their meeting meaning. On their minimum common
programme was the achievement of political decolonization of Asia and
Africa. Moreover they all appreciated that regaining political
independence was a means and not an end, the latter being winning
economic, social and cultural liberation. On this, two views divided the
Bandung guests: there was a majority view of those who believed in a
potential “development” within “interdependence” in the world economy,
and a view of the communist leaders who believed that a withdrawal from
the capitalist camp would lead – with, if not behind the USSR – to the
building of a world socialist camp.
The leaders of
the capitalist Third World who did not expect to “leave the system” or
“delink” did not all have the same strategic and tactical view of
“development”. But in varying degrees they did think that the building
of an economy and an independent developed society (albeit within global
interdependence) entailed an element of “conflict” with the dominant
West (the radical wing regarded it as essential to put a stop to control
over the national economy by foreign monopoly capital). In their further
concern to preserve the regained independence, they refused to join the
planetary war games and serve as bases for the encirclement of socialist
countries that US hegemony was seeking. However, they believed too that
refusing to join the Atlantic military pact did not imply a willingness
to come under the umbrella of its adversary, the USSR. Hence
“neutralism” and “non alignment”. The then secret history of relations
between China and the USSR, whose crisis was to become public knowledge
two years later, was to show that this position was not really very
different from the one taken by China in the 1960s. It was also the
position in which Yugoslavia found itself after the break of 1948. The
formation of a non aligned front had, therefore, Tito’s active sympathy
from the very start.
The drawing
together of the Afro-Asian states had already begun with the
establishment of the Arab- Asian group in the United Nations, in order
to defend the cause of independence for the struggling colonies. Bandung
reinforced this drawing together and gave the struggle a fillip. Three
years later, in liberated Accra, Kwame Nkrumah declared “Africa must
unite”. But once independence was gained and Nkrumahist pan-Africanism
failed and there was the demonstration of the impotence of the two camps
constituted around the Congo issue (the Casablanca bloc and the Monrovia
bloc from 1960 to 1963) African unity was to take the minimal form of
the establishment of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
During the
1960s and the 1970s at one summit meeting after another “non-alignment”
was gradually to slide from the stand point of a political solidarity
front geared to support for liberation struggles and rejection of
military alliances to a posture of “a trade union of economic claims on
the North”. The battle for a “new international economic order” engaged
upon in 1975 after the Middle East war of October 1973 and the
adjustment in the price of oil was the apotheosis of this evolution only
to sound its death knell.
Neither at
political nor economic level was the West light heartedly going to
accept the Bandung spirit. Was it mere chance that one year later
France, Britain and Israel would try to overthrow Nasser by the joint
aggression of 1956? Imperialist capital’s rejection of the Bandung
political vision was shown by the real hatred the West manifested for
the Third World radical leaders of the 1960s (Nasser, Soekarno, Nkrumah,
Modibo Keita), who were nearly all overthrown in the same period, from
1965 to 1968, which included Israel’s aggression of June 1967. It was,
therefore, a politically hamstrung non aligned camp that was to face the
global economic crisis from 1970-1971. The West’s non acceptance of the
proposed NIEO showed the genuine connection between the political and
economic aspects of the Afro-Asian initiative crystallized from Bandung.
What may
nowadays be called “development ideology”, in a crisis that may be
terminal, had its “moment of glory” between 1955 and 1975, but never
gave rise to an interpretation shared by everyone and understood in the
same way?
The
traditional communist camp was also not prepared to accept the aims that
emerged from Bandung. In 1948 Jdanov proclaimed the division of the
world into two camps – capitalist and socialist – and, in advance,
condemned as illusory any attempt to stand outside them, and hence to
wish to be “non aligned”. Within this spirit the communists could not
envisage any winning of independence by a national liberation movement
they had not led. India’s independence was marked by the Indian
Communist Party as a “day of national mourning” ; in South-East Asia the
Chinese and Vietnamese models were thought desirable to be extended to
Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. It was only
after the first “stabilization” of the 1950-1955 period (the victory in
China, armistice and partition in Korea and Vietnam, the admitted defeat
of guerrillas elsewhere in South-East Asia), after the Third World
“bourgeois” new regimes had proved their viability, after the start,
albeit under “bourgeois” leadership, of their conflict with the West,
and after Stalin’s death (1953) and Khrushchev’s ideological overtures,
that the notion of the possibility of a “viable third camp” and a “third
path of development” began to be appreciated.
The
non-communist Third World leaders did, however, believe in a “third path
of development” that would be neither “capitalist”, nor an imitation of
the socialist models of the USSR and China. Their rejection of Marxism
was tempered with considerations of varying kinds: they sometimes saw
Marxism as the descendant of European culture and incompatible with
their own people’s value systems (and religious conviction, Islam,
Hinduism or the peculiarities of negritude); sometimes they were merely
fearful of losing their independence (Soviet domination of Eastern
Europe, denounced by Tito, was on show to fuel their fear); sometimes
they were more drawn by the Western model of efficiency and consumption,
or freedom (although the latter was less highly valued), than by the
Soviet and Chinese models (less efficient or too austere and so on). Out
of these ambiguous attitudes were to emerge perhaps the ideologies of
“particular socialisms” (for example, African, Arab).
“Particular
socialism” or “particular paths to socialism of universal application”?
This is the locus of debate. The question is not yet settled and may be
more open today than ever. The –now open – crisis of “existing
socialism” may in fact cast doubt on the model of a supposedly achieved
socialism. But this crisis has gone through stages and indicates only
the interaction of different levels of critique.
The
Sino-Soviet dispute certainly had two aspects: one national and the
other in regard to the social and political view of a plan for society.
It cannot be doubted that China, as a potential great power, was not
going to leave Moscow the sole responsibility of deciding the strategies
and tactics of confrontation with the United States. It suspected the
USSR of being too susceptible of sacrificing the interests of other
peoples for its own, whereas Peking was convinced that the “socialist
revolution” was on the agenda in the “storm zones”, that is, the Third
World. At the same time, Maoism felt bound to make a critique of the
Soviet model of development and embark on an alternative path and an
approach that would not reproduce the models of labour organization,
consumption and the Western capitalist way of life, by replacing capital
ownership with state ownership.
The subsequent
arguments, polemics, realities and evolutions make it possible now to
have a clearer picture of the divergences and diagnostics of the
problems. But opinions and theorizations will go on producing different
pictures of the Soviet and Chinese systems that call themselves
socialist, of the genuine problems encountered in historical
construction (development of the forces of production and new social
relations), the emerging gap between the results achieved so far and the
idea of socialism (especially Marx’s idea), the ideological roots of
these evolutions (the historical limitations of Leninism and Maoism as
regards the state, the relationship with an avant garde party, the avant
garde and the people, and so forth), and the effects of these evolutions
on the world socialist movement and its integration in world politics
and so on.
These
realities call for a consideration of the hiatus in the leftist
nationalism of Bandung, for subtle judgement and a refusal to utter
“condemnations” in the name of some absolute values supposedly achieved
in nearly perfect or truly perfect models. But they call, too, for a
critical approach to the propositions of “particular socialism”. The
latter have not proved themselves to be a step forward in the solution
of problems facing the so-called socialist societies. On the contrary,
they have reproduced the shortcomings of the latter, sometimes to the
point of caricature: the single party (sometimes with only a paper
existence), absolute power, contempt for democracy and basic human
rights, without such faults bringing any compensation in terms of
economic (or military) efficiency. The ease with which such efforts are
overturned revealed by experience justifies some severity on this score.
There was a
Bandung plan, albeit implicit and vague, that might be described as the
“bourgeois” national plan for the Third World in our age. Although it
has particular forms and national characteristics it could be defined as
follows: (i) the desire to develop the forces of production and
diversify products (namely industrialize); (ii) the desire to ensure for
the national state direction and control of the process, (iii) the
belief that “technical” models provide “neutral” data that can only be
copied, albeit by mastering them; (iv) the belief that the process does
not primarily require popular initiative but merely popular acquiescence
in state action; (v) the belief that the process is not essentially in
contradiction with participation in exchanges with the world capitalist
system, even if the process does provoke occasional clashes with it.
The context of
capitalist expansion in the 1955-1970 period to some extent encouraged
crystallization of the plan. But by what criteria is the success of the
bourgeois national plan to be judged? Certainly not the apparent
criterion of per capita income.
The
implementation of the national bourgeois plan implies a series of
controls by the hegemonic national bourgeois class, through the state,
at least over the following processes: (i) control of reproduction of
labour power, which entails a fairly complete and balanced development
such that local agriculture can supply the essential ingredients of this
quantitative reproduction and at appropriate prices to bring a return on
capital; (ii) control of national resources; (iii) control of local
markets and the capacity to penetrate the world market on competitive
terms; (iv) control of financial machinery to ensure centralization of
the surplus and a say in its productive use; (v) control of the
technologies in use to the relevant level of development of the forces
of production.
On this basis
the Third World experiences can be classified under two headings:
countries that have attempted no more than to speed up growth without
worrying about the foregoing conditions (Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Pakistan
or Saudi Arabia, among others) and the long list of countries that have
attempted to fulfil these conditions (for example: Nasser’s Egypt,
Algeria, Tanzania, India, Brazil, South Korea ). As can be seen the
classification does not necessarily distinguish regimes concerned for a
measure of social justice and reform, especially land reform ( such as
Nasser’s Egypt or South Korea) from those which have had no hesitation
in accepting widening social inequalities (Brazil for example). It does
not necessarily distinguish attitudes in regards to transnational
capital (Brazil and Kenya are both open to it but the former seeks to
relate the capital to its national policy, whereas the latter is happy
to adjust to capital’s demands), nor even the issue of political
relations of contestation or alliance with East and West. Some
correlations can be found but the make up in terms of conjunctures makes
each Third World country a special case.
Putting aside
the variety of the experience it can be seen that the most coherent
achievements have occurred when an acute nationalist combat is combined
with a powerful social movement. Nasser’s Egypt was certainly one of the
best examples of this.
It is no
longer possible to ignore the short comings of these attempts that have
not withstood the vagaries of fortune. The agricultural and food crisis,
the foreign debt, the mounting technological dependence, the poor
capacity to withstand military aggression, the arrival of the capitalist
models of conspicuous waste and the effect of this on ideology and
culture are all signs of the historical limitations of the attempt. Even
before the current crisis brought an opportunity for a “Western
offensive” to reverse the changes, the shortcomings had already brought
things to a halt. This is not to say that the experiences were bound to
stop short where they did and that their “failure” was inevitable. We
should argue that to go any further, a genuine “revolution” was crucial,
one that would destroy the double illusion of national development
unless it arose from genuinely popular authority and the possibility of
any such development without “delinking” from the world system. It is
not to say that some evolution in this direction was possible in this or
that instance, in Egypt for example. It did not happen and now history
has moved on.
It is in this
sense that we say the plan warrants the description as a bourgeois
national plan: and meanwhile it has been found to be impossible. In the
same way history has shown that in our day the national bourgeoisie is
incapable of achieving what it has done elsewhere, in Europe, North
America and XIXth century Japan. This thesis is no novelty and it is not
the first failure of the attempt in question. Again to give just one
example, Egypt’s history since Mohamed Ali is one of a succession of
bourgeois national attempts smashed each time by the combination of
their internal fragility and imperialist aggression: in their own way
Mohamed Ali, Khedive Ismaïl, Orabi (if his revolution has been
successful), the Wafd achieved a great deal, in the context of their
times, with the means that the modalities of formation of the Egyptian
bourgeoisie offered within the framework of the overall capitalist
system of the day: their imprint remains strong and in some respects the
changes they made are irreversible. But it has to be acknowledged that
their failure opened the way each time to a “compradorisation” of Egypt
in the style of the time.
No more needs
to be said. A study of other Third World countries and regions would in
our opinion illustrate the same thesis: an unbroken succession of
national bourgeois attempts, repeated abortions and surrender to the
demands of the subordination that has followed each time in Latin
America since the XIXth century (to mention only the most recent
examples of the Mexican revolution in the 1910s to 1920s and Peronist
Argentina), in India (whose evolution from Nehru’s “first plan” to the
return of the right to government after Congress’s first failure is
eloquent), and in numerous Arab and African countries.
The post
Second World War circumstances were unusually favourable. At the
economic level the North’s strong economic growth made “adjustment” in
the South easier. At the political level the peaceful coexistence
emerging from the growth of Soviet industrial and military power (from
the first Sputnik space flight to the “strategic balance” achieved in
the 1960s to 1970s) in combination with the decline of the former
British and French colonialism and the upsurge of the Afro-Asian
independence struggles gave the Soviet alliance real effectiveness.
Successes are
always crowned with disappointment. An illusion of “gradual” and
virtually painless evolution towards socialism was fostered by the
formulation of the theory of the so-called “non capitalist road”. Of
course this theory did not convince everybody. China denounced it
forcefully in the 1960s as an opiate intended to lull the peoples to
sleep and damp down the explosions in the “storm zones”. Che Guevarism
tried to counter it with immediate military revolution.
History has
now moved on again. Since the early 1970s, the West’s economic boom has
been smothered to give way to the structural crisis under way, while
competition between Europe, Japan and the United States took over from
reconstruction under American protection. In the Soviet Union,
Khrushchev’s promises – to overtake American living standards in 1989 –
and the attempts at rapid democratization in the wake of the XIXth
Congress gave way to Brezhnev’s stick-in-the-mud, timid and ineffectual
reforms to overcome the management crisis of a system faced with the
challenge of moving from extensive to intensive accumulation.
Gorbachev’s initiatives may mark a new departure, but it is early days
to judge their extent and effectiveness. In China, the about turn
following Mao’s death showed that neither the issue of economic
efficiency nor of democracy have found their “definitive” response.
Throughout the Third World the food crisis (to the extreme of chronic
famine in Africa), the foreign debt crisis and the standstill of
imported technology have brought a series of surrenders to the dictates
of transnational capital, organized around the Paris and London Clubs,
the IMF, the World Bank and the consortium of the large Western banks.
In the radically inclined countries, coups d’état and military
aggression (the 1967 war was no chance) have largely contributed to
halting the experiences under way. The Bandung era is past.
The axis of
the new world conjuncture is Western capitalist aggression against the
Third World peoples, with the aim of subordinating their further
evolution to the demands of redeployment of transnational capital. Is
this a painful but passing phenomenon that must necessarily be followed
by a new blossoming of “national bourgeois” advances? Or is it a
historical turning point that will no longer allow the following of
these successive national bourgeois plans characteristic of at least a
century of recent history? This is where the real debate on the
character of the challenges and the options for the future lies.
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Samir Amin |
