Marxism

After the Russian Revolution in 1917-1919, Marxism became the mainstream of socialist movements, and became an increasingly attractive political-ideological alternative to liberal capitalism around the world.

• The success of the Russian revolution showed the political viability of Marxist organization.
• The Soviet Union's renunciation of imperialist claims attracted many non-European intellectuals. This attraction was especially strong after WWI demonstrated the self-destructive extremes of capitalist nationalism.
• It provided a potential resolution for ambivalent feelings about Western progress. Marxism claimed to be a science and embraced the technological achievements of capitalism. But it also promised to go beyond capitalism, to create a more just and humanitarian society.

Orthodox Marxist theory provided some obstacles to the development of Marxist movements in non-industrialized countries.

• A foundation of Marxist theory was a belief in evolutionary stages that each nation went through a series of stages from slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist to communist society. The creation of a large, self-conscious proletarian class by capitalism was necessary to create a socialist society. How could peasants in feudal societies engage in communist revolution?
• Marx and other Marxist theorists had little to say about Asia, except to categorize them as "Asian despotisms" under a stagnant "Asiatic mode of production" that was no longer historically evolving.
• For a Marxist revolution to be successful, it had to be international. A worker's revolution in a single country would be repressed in its early stages by the power of neighboring bourgeois nations.

Vladimir Lenin grappled with many of these problems in the 1910s, creating theoretical foundations that could be used as a framework for socialist revolution in colonized and non-industrialized nations. The idea that imperialism was a stage in capitalist development was key to his rethinking of Marxist theory:

• To explain the willingness of European workers to take up the cause of bourgeois nationalism in WWI, he argued that their loyalty had been bought by high wages and growing social welfare programs.
• Such concessions were possible because exploitative capitalist extraction had been exported to the colonies. Monopolies were growing even stronger and more politically powerful, and the workers' movement had become too fragmented to confront them.
• Imperialism disrupted the natural evolution of colonial societies, but also created a connection between workers in Europe and the oppressed of colonized countries.
• Given the effects of imperialism, national liberation movements were an effective temporary expediency that could promote the development of proletariat classes in countries oppressed by imperialism. A distinction was made between proletariat nationalism and bourgeois nationalism (this idea was developed in conjunction with the Indian communist M. N. Roy, although they differed in their estimation of whether communists should make a temporary alliance with bourgeois nationalists in colonized countries. Lenin favored the alliance and Roy opposed it.)

In the 1920s, Communist parties appeared in Asia and many parts of Latin America, often spearheaded by students returned from Europe and encouraged by the Soviet Union and Cominterm meetings. Parties began to appear in Africa in the 40s and 50s, but by this time the Soviets and Cominterm had lost interest in colonial questions. The new parties used Lenin's ideas as the basis for new innovations:

• The disruptive influence of imperialism was actually an opportunity that made it possible for non-industrialized countries to move rapidly through the capitalist stage and reach socialism more easily than in the West.
• Thinkers like Carlos Mariátegui in Peru, Mao Zedong in China, and Leopold Senghor in Senegal developed arguments about the necessity to create localized forms of Marxist revolution, suitable to local historical conditions.
• Many nascent communist movements accepted the need for a Leninist vanguard Party, especially in situations where the proletariat class was less developed and revolutionary organization was based in the peasantry.
• They argued for the need to create a revolutionary consciousness through force of will and cultural propaganda, rather than just waiting for economic developments. A New Man who had rejected bourgeois understandings of self was to be the basis of future communist society..

Especially in Asia, some of these Marxist parties became very well organized. Their sophisticated theoretical arguments attracted intellectuals. They were also very effective at grass roots mobilization. The drive to attract (and coerce) widespread political participation, and the necessity of identifying and repressing "class enemies" corresponded with an ardent nationalism in many communist states.

A successful communist revolution took place in China in 1949, which was an inspiration for other "Third World" countries. Over the next two decades, communist states were established in N. Korea, Cuba (which did not openly identify as communist until a year or two after the revolution) and Southeast Asia, as well as a variety of communist-leaning states in Africa.

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