In concluding his thorough biography of Ho Chi Minh, William J. Duiker, a US historian who specializes in East Asian Studies, writes: 

     I have maintained in previous posts that charismatic leaders emerge in revolutionary processes and that the charismatic leader is necessary for the success of the revolution (“Toussaint L’Ouverture” 12/10/2013; “Reflections on the Russian Revolution” 1/29/2014; “Lessons of the Mexican Revolution” 2/19/2014; “The dream renewed” 3/6/2014; “Is Marx today fulfilled?” 3/20/2014).  Drawing upon the formulation of the early twentieth century German sociologist Max Weber, I use the term “charismatic” not only to refer to a capacity to persuade and influence, but also to refer to an exceptional capacity to understand, particularly to discern structures of domination and the necessary steps for liberation.  In accordance with this definition, Hitler was influential, but he was not charismatic; he was a false prophet.  But there exist in our era charismatic leaders who stand in the tradition of the ancient prophet Amos, leaders who discern injustices and who denounce the complacency of the powerful and the privileged, and who sacrifice a normal personal life in order to dedicate themselves to lead the people in the quest for an alternative and more just social system.  Ho Chi Minh was one of them.

     The underlying social forces to which Duiker refers indeed are present.  Charismatic leaders do not act in a social vacuum.  When social structures contradict cultural values, and when the objective conditions for social movement exist, social movements emerge.  These underlying social conditions have been present in the modern world-system since the last decades of the eighteenth century: the ideology of the world-system has proclaimed democratic values, but it has maintained colonial and neocolonial structures that negate democratic rights; and among the colonized and neocolonized, the human and material resources for the organization of social movements have been present.  But the social movements have been full of contradictions and confusions, which is to be expected, given the complex nature of social dynamics.  The gift of the charismatic leader is to discern, in the midst of the confusions and contradictions, the correct way from the wrong path and to unify the movement on the basis of the correct direction, thus bringing the movement to a more advanced stage.

      We in the societies of the North have gone down the path of cynicism.  We distrust authority in any form, including charismatic authority.  We doubt anyone’s capacity to discern the correct way from the wrong path, and we prefer self-expression to discipline.  But let me mention an example.  In the mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1969 in Washington, some demonstrators were dancing nude and smoking marijuana, a celebration that was recorded by television cameras.  A celebration of this form was an error.  The goal of the protest ought to have been the building of a sustained popular movement, and this would require bringing on board people of all ages and religious values, which cannot be accomplished with behavior that is insensitive to the values of many of the people.  The goal ought to have been the political education of the people, focusing on the imperialist character of US foreign policy.  If some felt the need to raise cultural issues pertaining to sexual mores and drug usage, the movement can arrange for such discussion, conducted responsibly in an appropriate context.  But the movement at that historic moment lacked a charismatic leader who could discern the correct path and lead the movement in the correct direction, bringing it to a more advanced stage.  The revolution of the 1960s did not succeed.

     In revolutionary processes that succeed, we observe a charismatic leader, teaching and exhorting the people with respect to issues ranging from concrete strategies to grand theoretical analyses.  In case of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh possessed the capacity to discern the correct path for the Vietnamese Revolution and to lead the people toward the fulfillment of its mission.  Ho’s most important contribution was to adapt Marxism-Leninism to the colonial situation of French Indochina.  He discerned that it was not a question of class exploitation versus national domination, and that there is a double axis of domination, in which both class exploitation and national domination are intertwined.  Accordingly, liberation requires the transformation of both forms of domination. Unlike Marxism-Leninism, Ho was not suspicious of the peasantry, for he saw the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasant.  But he recognized that the peasants needed organization and leadership, and he thus grasped the need for the formation of a vanguard political party composed of enlightened members of the various popular sectors of intellectuals, peasants, and workers.  He understood that revolutionary steps could be taken only when national and international conditions are present, and he therefore paid careful attention to these conditions and was flexible in the implementation of the revolutionary program, often holding back militant members of the party who were anxious to proceed quickly.  And although he led his people in two wars of national liberation against global powers, and although he never wavered in his commitment to the principles that made the wars necessary (namely, Vietnamese national independence and reunification), his search for a peaceful resolution was constant. 

     We will be looking at subsequent posts at the son of a Confucian scholar who was born in 1890 in the French protectorate of Annam with the name of Nguyen Sing Cung, who was given the name of Nguyen Tat Thanh (meaning “he who will succeed”) at age 11 by his father, who took the name Nguyen Ai Quoc ( “Nguyen the Patriot”) at the age of 29 in Paris, and who became known to the world as Ho Chi Minh (“He Who Enlightens”).


References

Duiker, William J.  2000.  Ho Chi Minh.  New York:  Hyperion.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam, Confucian scholars, Vietnamese nationalism, Ho Chi Minh

     The internal political process that led to accommodation to the French by the Vietnamese imperial court included the deposing of the young Emperor Ham Nghi and the installing of an accommodationist emperor.  Ham Nghi and his regent fled into the mountains, continuing to claim that he was the true monarch.  Many civilian and military officials did not accept the decision of the imperial court to surrender to the French, and they organized local armed forces seeking to restore Ham Nghi to power.  The scholar-official Phan Dinh Phung launched a Save the King Movement that sought the restoration of Ham Nghi, with the intention of driving the French from Vietnam (Duiker 2000:13-14).

      The scholar-gentry class from which Phan Dinh Phung originated was an important component of traditional Vietnamese society.  It consisted of men who had been educated in the Confucian classics in preparation for rigorous examinations that would qualify them for posts in the national and provincial governments.  Members of the class were government officials, teachers in government schools, founders of private schools, and private tutors.  They had a higher standard of living than most peasants, but they were not wealthy, and many supplemented their incomes with farming. 

      Drawing upon a tradition of nationalism rooted in the Vietnamese historic struggle against Chinese domination, the scholar-intellectuals played a leading role in the nationalist movement in opposition to French colonialism (García Oliveras 2010:21-22).  One of them was Phan Chu Trinh, who resigned his government post in 1905 in order to travel throughout the country and meet with scholars.  He maintained that, although the French claimed to be on a “civilizing mission,” in fact they were interested in the economic exploitation of Vietnam.  In an open letter to the French Governor General, Trinh conceded that the French had brought some advantages, such as introducing modern systems of transportation and communication; he argued, however, that the colonial regime was perpetuating a corrupt imperial bureaucracy.  He advocated a reform of colonialism on the basis of progressive Western and Chinese concepts (Duiker 29-31).

     Another important member of the scholar-gentry class was Phan Boi Chau.  Rather than pursuing a career in the government bureaucracy, he traveled throughout the central provinces, seeking to organize among scholars a movement in opposition to the imperial court and French colonialism.  He believed that Vietnam ought to modernize, and he adopted as a model the modernization of Japan under the Emperor Meiji.  Whereas Phan Chu Trinh hoped for French cooperation in the reform of the French colonial system, Phan Boi Chou proposed violent resistance in order to drive out the French and establish a constitutional monarchy similar to that of Japan (Duiker 2000:25-26, 40).

     As a consequence of the objective conditions of French colonialism, opposition to French colonial rule was not confined to the scholar-gentry class.  Peasants were forced to pay high rents on land and new taxes on alcohol, salt, and opium, and they were subjected to forced labor requirements.  Conditions on the rubber plantations of Cochin China were especially harsh.  Factory workers and coal miners suffered low salaries and long working hours (Duiker 2000:31, 35-36, 110).

     French colonialism brought changes in the characteristics of the Vietnamese scholar-gentry class.  The Confucian examination for bureaucratic careers was abolished, and French educational institutions were established.  A new generation of educated Vietnamese emerged in the 1920s, who originated from the families of the traditional scholar-gentry class, but who were educated in the French educational system.  These Western educated intellectuals continued the tradition of the scholar-gentry class of opposition to French colonial domination, and they formed various patriotic nationalist political parties during the 1920s.  Most of the leaders of the new political parties originated from the traditional scholar-gentry class.  The most prominent was Nguyen An Ninh, the son of a Confucian scholar who had been educated in Paris and who had been a part of Phan Boi Chau’s movement.  Like Phan Chu Trinh, he believed that Western values could overcome the limitations of the traditional Confucian system, which, in his view, had stifled creativity and had contributed to French domination.  (Duiker 2002:107-12, 116, 138-39)

      In the earliest decades of the Vietnamese nationalist movement in opposition to French colonialism, we find a situation different in fundamental respects from revolutionary processes in Western Europe and Russia.  In Western Europe and Russia, the progressive members of the petit bourgeoisie espoused the goals of the popular movements from below, but not having objective interest in a political system governed by the popular classes, they ultimately betrayed the popular revolution.  But in the colonial situation of Vietnam, the national petit bourgeoisie is part of the oppressed social sector.  As a result, the traditional scholar-gentry class, a Southeast Asian expression of the petit bourgeoisie, possessed an objective interest in ending European domination.  They thus played a leading role in the emergence of the nationalist movement, and their commitment to it would be deeply rooted.  And this would occur in the context of a society in which the industrial working class was very small, and peasants comprised 90% of the population.  These differences would lead Ho Chi Minh to a reformulation of Marxism-Leninism, adapting it to the conditions of Southeast Asia, an issue to which we turn in subsequent posts.

       
References

Duiker, William J.  2000.  Ho Chi Minh.  New York:  Hyperion.

García Oliveras, Julio A. 2010.  Ho Chi Minh El Patriota: 60 años de lucha revolucionaria.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam, French colonialism, French Indochina, Confucian scholars, Vietnamese nationalism

     The French imposition of colonial rule on Vietnam was rooted in global historical factors.  The centralization of Western European states began to occur in the tenth century.  The revival of commerce led to the expansion of a merchant class that had an interest in overcoming feudal obstacles to the movement of goods and people.  At the same time, the monarchs, who under feudalism found their powers limited by local lords, also had an interest in overcoming the localism of feudalism and in centralizing power.  Thus, the monarchs, in alliance with an incipient commercial bourgeoisie, centralized state structures by raising armies, conquering territory, and taking effective political control.  This process was intertwined with the formation of nationality identities that coincided with the territories governed by the centralized states, thus establishing a cohesive nation-state (see “European feudalism” 8/13/2013; “The modern nation-state” 8/14/2013).

     The emergence of the modern nation-state was particularly advanced in Spain, England and France (see “The modern nation-state” 8/14/2013), with the result that by the end of the fifteenth century, these nations had developed a significant capacity for conquest.  The centralized Western European nation-states were still no match for China or Japan, but they had developed the capacity to conquer the indigenous empires and societies of America.    

     The Spanish conquest of America was aided by environmental factors.  The steel shields and swords of the Spanish were more advanced than the bronze and stone weaponry of the indigenous, who had not discovered iron.  And the Spanish had horses, the Sherman tanks of pre-modern warfare; whereas in America, large mammals had become extinct during human colonization.  And the Spanish conquest was aided by the relative lack of immunity to diseases carried by the European conquerors, a consequence of less contact among populations in America than in Africa, Asia, and Europe (see “What enables conquest?” 8/9/2013).

     The Spanish imposed a colonial system characterized by forced labor and the exportation of gold and silver to Spain.  The bullion was used by Spain to purchase manufactured goods from Northwestern Europe, thus facilitating the commercial expansion and agricultural modernization of Northwestern Europe.  These dynamics created a European-centered world-economy that encompassed Western Europe as its core and Latin America and Eastern Europe as its periphery, a territory much larger than that of the Chinese world-empire.  And it increased the economic and military power of the centralized states of Britain and France, which after 1750 began a conquest of vast regions of Africa and Asia, seeking to expand even further the geographical territory of the European-centered world-economy (see “What is a world-system?” 8/1/2013; “The origin of the modern world-economy” 8/6/2013; “Conquest, gold, and Western development” 8/8/2013).

     Thus, we can see in sum the dynamics that enabled Western European conquest and domination of the world, which reached its culmination during the twentieth century.  The common interests of the monarchs and a rising merchant class created the modern nation-state, a centralized state with an advanced capacity for conquest, but not as advanced as the empires of Southeast Asia.  Spain proceeded to conquer the empires and societies of America, leading to the formation of a European-centered world-economy, which further increased the capacity for conquest of the Western European states, particularly Britain and France.  After 1750, the European nation-states, increasingly powerful, undertook a project of conquest and domination of vast regions of Asia and Africa, which was dialectically related to the modernization of industry and further increased the power of the Western European nation-states.

     But the European nation-states would find formidable resistance in the world-empires of Southeast Asia.  The region had developed food production early, and its empires were advanced (see “Food production and conquest” 8/12/2013).  For centuries, China was by far the largest and most advanced world-empire, and its conquests had included the empire of Vietnam.  As a result of its considerable strength, European powers deferred invasions of China until the nineteenth century.  Because of European invasions beginning in 1839, China was compelled to accept treaties that led to her partial de-industrialization, but China was never conquered, colonized, and peripheralized like most of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (Fairbank 1986; 1992; Frank 1979). 

     For its part, Japan was not invaded by the European powers during the period of the expansion of the European-centered world-economy from 1750 to 1914.  As a result, Japan experienced “independent national development” (quoted in Frank 1979:153).  Its project for a Japanese-centered world-system in Asia clashed with the European-centered world-system in the twentieth century, and it was brought to an end by the Japanese defeat in World War II and the subsequent occupation by the United States, leading to Japan’s incorporation as a core nation in the European-centered world-economy.

      French invasions of Vietnam were selective, and its conquest of Vietnam was partial.  French troops had landed in Da Nang in central Vietnam in 1858, but imperial troops compelled the French to withdraw.  Beginning in 1859, the southern region was occupied by French troops, and Cochin China was developed as a colony directly administered by the French.  As a result, in the south, French settlers developed plantations, and Saigon emerged as a commercial and industrial center.  And in the northern region, Hanoi was attacked and several cities along the Red River were occupied by French troops in the 1880s.  The French protectorate of Tonkin in the north in effect functioned as a French colony, although Cochin China was more attractive to most French settlers and investors.  But most of the empire of Vietnam, stretching between Tonkin and Cochin China and including the imperial capital of Hue, had not been conquered by the French.  The Vietnamese emperor ceded political influence over this central region to the French, and it became the French protectorate of Annam, with the Vietnamese imperial court and bureaucracy functioning as a puppet government.  To be sure, the emperor was compelled to concede the transformation of the countryside into the production of rice for export and to provide labor for the plantations, thus fulfilling the economic goals of the French colonial project.  Nevertheless, because of the indirect form of French rule, which was in effect a concession to the Vietnamese emperor, the peripheralization of Annam was less thorough than in Cochin China (Duiker 2000:9, 12-13, 42, 110-11; see “French colonialism in Vietnam” 4/25/2013).

      The ceding of political influence and territory to the French by the emperor was opposed at the outset by a faction in the imperial court and by the Confucian scholar-gentry class, many of whom favored continued military resistance against French aggression.  A movement of opposition to French colonialism began immediately.  It would be a movement not only in opposition to French colonialism but also in opposition to the collaboration with French colonial rule by the Vietnamese imperial court.  This will be the subject of our next post.


References

Duiker, William J.  2000.  Ho Chi Minh.  New York:  Hyperion.

Fairbank, John King.  1986.  The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985.  New York:  Harper & Row.

__________.  1992.  China:  A New History.  Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Frank, Andre Gunder.  1979.  Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam, French colonialism, French Indochina, Cochin China

     We have seen in previous posts that after 1750, European nations conquered vast regions of Africa and Asia, incorporating the conquered regions into the European-centered capitalist world-economy (see “New peripheralization, 1750-1850” 8/20/2013; “The world-economy becomes global, 1815-1914” 8/21/2013).  As a particular manifestation of this global process, the French conquest of Vietnam began in 1859, when French troops attacked Saigon, a commercial port in the southern region of the empire of Vietnam.  The French overcame the resistance of the imperial troops, whose weapons were less advanced.  The emperor Tu Duc negotiated in 1862 the ceding to the French of three southern provinces, which later would become part of the French colony of Cochin China (Duiker 2000:12).

     The French invasion of Vietnam resumed in the 1880s, when the French attacked Hanoi and occupied several major cities along the Red River in the North.  This occurred shortly after the death of Tu Duc, and it threw an imperial court already in division over succession into further division concerning how to respond to the renewed French aggression.  An accommodationist faction came to dominate the court, and it ceded political influence to France over the remaining territory of Vietnam.  The French divided Vietnam into the protectorate of Tonkin in the far north, where the traditional capital city of Hanoi was located; and the protectorate of Annam, which included the imperial capital of Hue and stretched from Tonkin to the French colony of Cochin China in the far south.  The Vietnamese imperial court and its bureaucracy were allowed to govern in the protectorate of Annam, functioning as a puppet authority under the direction of the French (Duiker 2000:12-13).

     We have seen in previous posts that conquest and colonial domination involved peripheralization, where the newly conquered regions were converted into exporters of raw materials on a base of forced labor (see “New peripheralization, 1750-1850” 8/20/2013; “The world-economy becomes global, 1815-1914” 8/21/2013; “The modern world-economy” 8/2/2013; “Unequal exchange” 8/5/2013).  This pattern was followed in Vietnam, as feudal Vietnamese communal agriculture was transformed into a system characterized by privately-owned large-scale plantations and mines oriented to the exportation of rubber, rice, and minerals.  The plantations and mines were in the hands of a small number of owners, principally foreigners; and the puppet Vietnamese authority was required to supply forced laborers for them.  In addition, during colonial rule many small farmers became tenant farmers burdened by debt peonage (Prina 2008:14; Duiker 2000:173-76; Fall 1967:69; Ho 1968:236-237).

     The peripheralization of Vietnam was concentrated in the French colony of Cochin China, in part because it was a colony directly administered by the French rather than a protectorate administered indirectly through a Vietnamese government under French direction.  The production of rubber and rice for export, on a base of forced and super-exploited labor, provided the economic foundation for the colony of Cochin China.  Rubber seedlings had been imported from Brazil, and rubber plantations under French ownership were developed along the Cambodian border.  In the Mekong River delta, the French drained the marshlands, and rice was cultivated by sharecroppers who paid exorbitant rents to absentee Vietnamese landlords living in Saigon.  The rice was processed in plants owned by Chinese descendants of settlers of previous centuries, as Cochin China became the third largest rice exporter in the world. In addition to owning rice mills, the Chinese controlled banking, and they were an important force as merchants in Saigon and other cities of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  They lived in separate Chinese sections that maintained significant components of Chinese culture.  In addition, several thousand Europeans settled in Saigon, attracted by nearby rubber, tea, and coffee plantations as well as opportunities vis-á-vis factory ownership and the import-export trade.  Saigon became the largest industrial and commercial city of Vietnam, as textile mills, cement factories, and food processing plants emerged (Duiker 2000:42, 110-11).

     The accommodation of the emperor and the imperial court to French colonial domination undermined the prestige and authority of the emperor.  And it led to a decline of fidelity to the Confucian ethic, which stressed service to the community, personal right conduct, and benevolence.  Corruption became endemic among bureaucratic officials, and land that was previously reserved for poor families was now seized by the wealthy.  The Vietnamese imperial system was in decadence (Duiker 2000:29).

     What historic social, political, and environmental factors enabled the French to impose colonialism on Vietnam?  This will be the subject of our next post.


References

Duiker, William J.  2000.  Ho Chi Minh.  New York:  Hyperion.

Fall, Bernard B., Ed.  1967.  Ho Chi Minh On Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920-26.  New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

Ho Chi Minh.  1968.  Páginas Escogidas.  La Habana: Instituto del Libro.

Prina, Agustín.  2008.  La Guerra de Vietnam.  Mexico: Ocean Sur.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam, French colonialism, French Indochina, Cochin China

     The first human populations arrived in Vietnam nearly 500,000 years ago.  Food cultivation emerged around 12,000 B.C.E.  By the third century B.C.E., the ancient state of Van Lang reached its fullest development on an economic foundation of fishing, agriculture, cattle breeding, and cloth manufacturing.  Van Lang was conquered by Nam Cuong, an empire located in Southern China and Northern Vietnam.  The Chinese conquerors established Au Lac, a slave-based civilization dedicated to the exploitation of copper mines and the manufacturing of copper products.  Thus began ten centuries of Chinese domination of Vietnam, under which emerged a feudal economy and a class of Vietnamese landholders.  The period was characterized by struggles against Chinese domination, in which both the peasants and the landholders participated.  These struggles succeeded in expelling the Chinese governors on two occasions, establishing two brief periods of Vietnamese independence (43-46 C.E. and 544-632).  Finally, in 938, Ngo Quyen expelled the Chinese and established the Ngo dynasty (939-68), which initiated a period of Vietnamese independence that lasted until the French conquest of the nineteenth century.  But during the period of Vietnamese independence, the Vietnamese empires had to resist repeated Chinese attempts to re-conquer the territory, which did result in a brief period of renewed Chinese domination in the early fifteenth century.  There also were efforts to conquer the territory by other foreign invaders, including the Mongols and Siam (García Oliveras 2010:14-17).

     Two types of military operations emerged during this long history of resistance to foreign domination: small-scale guerrilla attacks with dispersed forces; and larger battles with massive concentrations of troops.  The Vietnamese military tradition included a received wisdom concerning the conditions in which these alternate strategies should be used, taking into account a variety factors.  A fundamental lesson had been learned:  an invading force of greater technical power and numerical superiority can be defeated by an organized movement that is struggling for a just cause, that is advanced politically and morally, and that has the support of the people (García Oliveras 2010:18-20).  

     The independent Vietnamese empires were feudal societies dominated by large landholders and bureaucratic officials.  Popular uprisings were common.  During the fifteenth century, the Le dynasty initiated reforms involving the abolition of large-scale landholdings and the distribution of land.  The reforms led to economic growth, the development of national literature, the spread of Confucianism, and the height of the centralized power of the state.  However, economic decline occurred during the sixteenth century, accompanied by division of the national territory among the royal families and competition for land among local tyrants.  Popular uprisings occurred continuously, and they reached their height in the eighteenth century, when the Tay Son uprising led to the reunification of the country.  But in the nineteenth century, a reactionary feudal system of the Nguyen dynasty was established, provoking popular resistance from various social sectors, especially the peasants (García Oliveras 2010:17-18).

     Thus, we can see that, alongside the tradition of military resistance to conquest by foreign powers, the people of Vietnam had developed a tradition of popular resistance in defense of the rights of the people and in opposition to a landholding elite that promoted its particular interests at the expense of the needs of the majority, sometimes in collusion with foreign powers.  These traditions of military and popular resistance provided the foundation for the successful struggle during the twentieth century, first, against French colonial domination and its collaborators in the Vietnamese imperial court, and secondly, against the efforts of the United States and its puppet regime to establish a neocolonial bulwark in order to confront the upsurge of popular movements in Southeast Asia.

      We shall proceed in the next post with discussion of French colonialism.


References

García Oliveras, Julio A. 2010.  Ho Chi Minh El Patriota: 60 años de lucha revolucionaria.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam

      The Vietnamese Revolution began in the late nineteenth century as a movement of resistance to French colonial rule, which had been imposed through force beginning in 1859.  The movement began as a national liberation movement led by patriotic members of a scholar-gentry class, a class consisting of Confucian scholars and teachers who had been educated for bureaucratic posts in the Vietnamese empire, many of whom had been influenced by the values of the French Revolution.  After 1930, the movement synthesized the Vietnamese national liberation perspective with Marxism-Leninism.  In this synthesized formulation, the revolution sought not only independence from colonial rule but also a transformation of class structures, in defense of the interests of peasants and workers against the demands of the Vietnamese landholders as well as French landholders and factory owners; and it saw itself as part of a democratic transformation of the world in which all oppressed nations would be liberated from domination by other nations and workers of the world would be freed from exploitation.

       Due to its advanced character, the Vietnamese Revolution posed a threat to the world-system at a time when the world-system was in transition from colonialism to neocolonialism.  Both France, seeking to maintain its colonial empire, and the United States, the hegemonic power of the neocolonial world-system, would launch unsuccessful wars to subdue the Vietnamese Revolution.  The US war in Vietnam was an important factor in stimulating the US revolution of the 1960s, for it exposed the imperialist character of US foreign policy.  I will be discussing the revolution of the 1960s in future posts.

     As we have observed popular revolutions, we have seen that they are characterized by the emergence of charismatic leaders, persons with exceptional capacities to understand the structures of domination and the steps that must be taken to attain liberation (see “Toussaint L’Ouverture” 12/10/2013; “Reflections on the Russian Revolution” 1/29/2014; “Lessons of the Mexican Revolution” 2/19/2014; “The dream renewed” 3/6/2014; “Is Marx today fulfilled?” 3/20/2014).  The charismatic leaders do not emerge in a social vacuum.  They are formed by intellectual and moral traditions that are tied to social movements, and their charismatic gifts include the capacity to bring the movement to a more advanced stage.

     In the case of Vietnam, the charismatic leader who brought the revolution to a more advanced stage was Ho Chi Minh.  Ho’s initial values and understanding were formed by the patriotic nationalist movement of the Vietnamese scholar-gentry class, of which his father was a member.  As a young man, Ho traveled to Paris, supporting himself with various jobs.  There he encountered socialism and the writings of Lenin, and he participated in the founding of the French Communist Party.  Subsequently, he studied in the Soviet Union, where he was a constant advocate in the Communist International (Comintern) of the national liberation struggles of the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa.  Under the direction of the Comintern, he was the leading figure in the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, which established the Vietminh.  By 1945, the Vietminh had become the leading force in the popular movement for the independence of Vietnam, and as a result, Ho Chi Minh became President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.  He led the nation against the French, in its war of re-conquest; and against the United States, until his death in 1969, in its unsuccessful effort to support a puppet regime in the southern half of the country as a bulwark for the interests of the neocolonial powers.

     Ho’s comprehensive study and political education provided him with the intellectual and moral foundation for forging a creative synthesis of the French Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, and an Asian anti-colonial national liberation perspective.  He saw domination as having a double axis of colonial domination and class exploitation.  Accordingly, he believed that the full liberation of the people of Vietnam would require not only political independence from French, Japanese, and Chinese domination but also the liberation of peasants from class exploitation by traditional Vietnamese and colonial French landholders.  And he believed that full liberation of the workers of the West would require their solidarity with the Third World anti-colonial movements of national liberation.  His creative synthesis included a reformulation of the Marxist-Leninist concept of the vanguard, adapting it to the conditions of Vietnam.  Accordingly, he sought to develop a vanguard political party consisting of the most enlightened peasants, workers, and intellectuals.  A disciplined man who lived in modest material conditions, he was not only a political leader but also a writer, teacher, and educator. 

      The Vietnamese Revolution is an important example of insightful and courageous political action in a particular national context, a revolutionary movement that is part of a global revolutionary process that seeks a more just and democratic world-system.  As we intellectuals of the North seek to understand what we ought to do in the context of the structural terminal crisis of the world-system (see “The terminal crisis of the world-system” 3/28/2014) and the emergence of an alternative world-system from below (see “The alternative world-system from below” 4/15/2014), we should study and take seriously the lessons offered to us by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Revolution. 

       Vietnam, the Vietnamese Revolution, and Ho Chi Minh will be the themes of various subsequent posts.  I will begin in the next post with discussion of the pre-modern empires of Vietnam and the emergence of a Vietnamese tradition of political and military resistance to foreign domination.

     
Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh

Posted July 30, 2013
     
     In the Introduction to Volume One of The Modern World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein writes that his experiences in colonial Africa during the time of the African anti-colonial movements enabled him to see that European and African Nationalist conceptions are fundamentally different.  

“I went to Africa first during the colonial era,” he writes, “and I witnessed the process of ‘decolonization,’ and then of the independence of a cascade of sovereign states.  White man that I was, I was bombarded by the onslaught of the colonial mentality of Europeans long resident in Africa. And sympathizer of nationalist movements that I was, I was privy to the angry analyses and optimist passions of young militants of the African movements.  It did not take long to realize that not only were these two groups at odds on political issues, but that they approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks”  (1974:4; italics added).
 
African nationalists, Wallerstein noted, “saw the reality in which they lived as a ‘colonial situation,’” fundamentally different from and opposed to the “colonial mentality” of the Europeans (1974:4).

     Wallerstein saw in Africa what Bernard Lonergan describes as the formulation of opposed understandings in the context of different culturally-based horizons (see “What is cross-horizon encounter?” 7/26/13).  Moreover, Wallerstein’s scholarship shows that cross-horizon encounter is the key to social scientific understanding, for Wallerstein’s encounter with the African nationalist movement stimulated a process of reflection that enabled him to understand that the use of “society”as the unit of analysis, common in the Western social science of that time, established false assumptions for understanding the “colonial situation.” This understanding led Wallerstein to the conclusion that “the correct unit of analysis is the world-system” (Wallerstein 1974:7).  Driven by what Lonergan calls the “pure desire to know,” Wallerstein committed himself to the task of describing the historical development of the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1982, 1989, 2000, 2011 and Hopkins and Wallerstein 1996). His important and groundbreaking work ignores the disciplinary boundaries among history, economics, sociology, and political science in order to formulate the world-systems perspective, an alternative to the dominant Western social scientific paradigm and an alternative that takes into account the insights of the twentieth century Third World national liberation movements. 
 
      Wallerstein has identified four stages in the development of the modern world-system:  (1) the origin of the system on the foundation of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of vast regions of the American continents, establishing a world-economy, with Western Europe as its core and Latin America and Eastern Europe as its periphery (1492-1640); (2) a stage of stagnation, characterized by competition among core powers, during which the basic structures of the system were preserved and reinforced (1640-1815); (3) the expansion of the system from 1815-1917, made possible by the conquest of vast regions of Africa and Asia by European powers; and (4) 1917 to the present, characterized by the development of imperialism and neocolonialism as new forms of core domination and by the emergence of anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements in the Third World.  

     In future posts, we will draw upon the insights of Third World intellectuals and leaders, and we also will often find Wallerstein’s formulations to be helpful as we seek to understand.

     Scroll down to find posts that critically analyze the work of Immanuel Wallerstein:
“Wallerstein: A Critique” 7/31/0213
“Wallerstein and world-systems analysis” 3/25/2014
“Wallerstein and Africa” 3/26/2014
“Wallerstein: Europe-centered or universal?” 3/27/2014
“The terminal crisis of the world-system” 3/28/2014
“Domination and ideology” 3/31/2014
“Reunified historical social science” 4/1/2014
“Universal philosophical historical social science” 4/2/2014
“We can know the true and the good” 4/3/2104
“How can knowledge be reorganized?” 4/4/2014
“Wallerstein on liberalism” 4/6/2014
“Liberals or revolutionaries?” 4/7/2014
“Wallerstein on Leninism” 4/8/2014
“Wallerstein on revolution” 4/9/2014
“Wallerstein, Marx, and knowledge” 4/14/2014
“The alternative world-system from below” 4/15/2014
“Universal human values” 4/16/2014
“An alternative epistemology” 4/17/2014.


 Bibliography
 
Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I. New
York:  Academic Press.  
 
__________. 1979.  The Capitalist World Economy. New York:  Cambridge University Press.  

  __________. 1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York: 
Academic Press.

__________. 1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New  York: Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III. New York: Academic Press.

__________. 1990.  "Antisystemic  Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

 __________.  2000. “Long Waves as Capitalist Process” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 207-19. [Originally published in Review VII:4 (Spring 1984), Pp. 559-75.]

__________. 2000.  “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 253-63.  [Originally published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV:1-2 (January-April 1983), Pp. 100-8).

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 
Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Lonergan, cognitional theory, epistemology, philosophy, Wallerstein, world-system

Posted July 31, 2013

​     We have seen that Immanuel Wallerstein has developed a comprehensive historical social scientific understanding of the modern world that represents a significant advance over the mainstream approaches in the academic disciplines in the social sciences and history (see “Who is Immanuel Wallerstein?” 7/30/2013).  Wallerstein’s analysis, however, falls short of a full understanding of Third World insights, as can be seen with his analysis of the present structural crisis of the world system from 1970 to the present as well as his projections for the future (Wallerstein 1995, 1999).  Thus the world-systems perspective can be understood as a progressive understanding of the world-system, rooted in the post-1968 progressive consciousness of the peoples of the North, but still limited by the horizons of the North.  It nevertheless represents a useful point of departure for the development of an integral and universal historical social science, especially with respect to its description of the historical development of the world-system, a comprehensive description that is fully consistent with the Third World perspective.

     I offer the following specific criticisms of Wallerstein’s work.  First, Wallerstein does not make a sufficient distinction between Lenin and Leninism, on the one hand, and Stalin and the Soviet Union beginning with Stalin and later, on the other.  He demonstrates little understanding of Leninism.

     Secondly, Wallerstein does not have, in my view, a good understanding of the revolutionary Third World national liberation movements, and here I make three observations.  (1) Although Wallerstein sometimes incorporates a distinction between moderate and radical Third World national liberation governments and movements, he for the most part ignores this distinction. 

     (2) Wallerstein misreads the tendency of the Third World movements to synthesize Western concepts, believing that their adoption of Wilson’s principle of self-determination and Roosevelt’s concept of economic development for the Third World implied an acceptance of Western values.  Wallerstein does not appreciate the tendency of the Third World movement to adapt Western concepts to a colonial and neocolonial situation, placing them in the context of the Third World movement, which was forging in theory and practice an alternative political, intellectual and moral project. This Third World project was fundamentally opposed to the neo-colonial (but progressive) project of Wilson and Roosevelt. 

     (3) Wallerstein criticizes the revolutionary national liberation project for accepting the Enlightenment principle of gradually improving the human condition through the development and application of scientific knowledge.  But are we to abandon science and knowledge?  Wallerstein’s own solutions, which are vague, seem to draw upon the Enlightenment legacy and to fall back on the values of liberal ideology.  Wallerstein notes correctly that it is not inevitable that we progress.  But if we are to progress, must we not utilize knowledge?  Wallerstein seems to not understand that the Third World movement, especially in its present manifestations, has appropriated Enlightenment concepts in a way that avoids overly positivistic and rationalist perceptions.

     Thirdly, Wallerstein does not take seriously the important examples of Cuba and Vietnam.  These long-surviving Third World socialist revolutions were forged through a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism with the concepts of petit bourgeois national liberation, in other words, through an adaption of Marxism-Leninism to colonial and neocolonial conditions.  Wallerstein mentions Cuba and Vietnam only occasionally and sees them as expressions of the liberal project, which no longer has viability.  He does not engage in serious reflection on the lessons to be learned from these cases. 

     In my view, these limitations in Wallerstein’s analysis are a consequence of the fact that he did not engage in a personal encounter with the Third World movements in a persistent manner during the course of his career.  Although early in his career he encountered the African national liberation movement and he originally was an Africanist, and even though he took seriously Frantz Fanon and was influenced by his thinking, Wallerstein increasingly was influenced by French thinking as his career developed.  The French influence was important from the beginning, especially the work of Braudel, which was integral to Wallerstein's formulation of the world-systems perspective, which could be understood as a synthesis of Third World and European (or at least African and French) perspectives.  But as Wallerstein’s thought developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and as he turned to philosophical questions, he was increasingly influenced by French currents of thought, which stressed the uncertainty of knowledge and which were moving toward an abandonment of the Enlightenment project as part of a turn to a post-modern age.  But post-modernism has little saliency, even among intellectuals, in the Third World. 

     In spite of these limitations, Immanuel Wallerstein is the most important European intellectual of the period from 1945 to the present, and we often will have reason to draw upon his analysis.


Bibliography

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 

__________.  1979.  The Capitalist World Economy.  New York:  Cambridge University Press. 

__________.  1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1990.  "Antisystemic Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  2000.  “Long Waves as Capitalist Process” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 207-19. [Originally published in Review VII:4 (Spring 1984), Pp. 559-75.]

__________.  2000.  “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 253-63. [Originally published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV:1-2 (January-April 1983), Pp. 100-8).

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Lonergan, cognitional theory, epistemology, philosophy, Wallerstein, world-system

Posted March 25, 2014

​     In reviewing the process of Latin American union and integration and its implications for the possible establishment of a more just and democratic world-system, we found that Immanuel Wallerstein maintained more than thirty years ago that the world-system has entered a terminal structural crisis, and it is in transition to something else, including possibly a socialist civilizational project (see “A change of epoch?” (3/18-2004).  Wallerstein is the most important Northern intellectual of our time.  He has moved beyond the conventional disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences and history and has formulated an analysis of the historical development and current dilemmas of the modern world-system.  Our grasping of the basic insights of his work is necessary for our understanding of the political and moral choices that we today confront.  I have in previous posts tried to formulate succinctly these important insights (see “Immanuel Wallerstein” 7/30/2014; “What is a world-system?” 8/1/2013; “The modern world-economy” 8/2/2013; “Unequal exchange” 8/5/2013; “The origin of the modern world-economy” 8/6/2013; “Modernization of the West” 8/7/2013; “Conquest, gold, and Western development” 8/8/2013; “Consolidation of the world-economy, 1640-1815” 8/19/2013; “New peripheralization, 1750-1850” 8/20/2013; “The world-economy becomes global, 1815-1914” 8/21/2013).

     When I first read the initial volumes of The Modern World System (1974, 1980, 1989) in the 1980s, I interpreted Wallerstein’s analysis of the historical development of the modern world-system as a comprehensive description that incorporated the basic insights of Black Nationalism, placing them in a broader global and historical context.  (Black Nationalism had formed the basic premises of my scholarship as a result of my study at the Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago in the early 1970s).  In more recent years, reading Wallerstein’s collections of essays (1995, 1999, 2003, 2004, 2006), I discovered that Wallerstein and I have divergent interpretations of the political and epistemological implications of the Third World national liberation movements (see “Wallerstein: A Critique” 7/31/0213).

     I take this difference to be rooted in the different trajectories of our work and in the different social experiences that our work provided.  Wallerstein, as a young sociologist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, encountered African nationalism as it was transforming the political reality of Africa and the world. He discerned that African nationalists looked at the world from a perspective different from Europeans, from a perspective that was rooted in the “colonial situation.”  He appropriated African nationalist insights, and he incorporated them in the formulation of “world-systems analysis,” in which he was influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel, and through which, as he would later express, he expanded the time scope and space scope of the African independence movements.  Beginning in the 1980s, Wallerstein was influenced by the Nobel Prize chemist Ilya Prigogine.  Wallerstein appropriated Prigogine’s analysis of physical processes, arriving at the understanding that the world-system had entered “bifurcation” or structural crisis.  In addition, Wallerstein drew upon both Braudel and Prigogine to address epistemological issues and to see the need to reunify knowledge, overcoming separation of the social sciences and history as well as the division between science and philosophy.

      But my experience of encounter with Third World movements led me in a somewhat different direction.  I saw the Third World movements as providing a foundation for a reconstruction of the political-economy of the world-system and a formulation of an alternative epistemological consensus that would be integral to a reconstructed world-system.  That is, I viewed the Third World movements as not merely formulating important insights that should be incorporated in a European-based understanding of historical systems and knowledge, but as providing a foundation for a just and democratic world-system and for universal human understanding of the true and the right.  My understanding and conviction deepened as I proceeded to encounter Third World movements beyond the first encounter with Black Nationalism: the popular movement in Honduras; the Cuban Revolution and the speeches and writings of its historic charismatic leader, Fidel Castro Ruz; and “socialism for the XXI century” in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, observing it from the sympathetic vantage point of Cuba.  All of these manifestations of Third World national liberation movements possessed important common elements: an understanding of the importance of colonialism and neocolonialism in shaping the world-system; a faith in the capacity of social movements formed by the people to create a more just and democratic world; and a conviction that we can know the true and the right.  In addition, these different Third World nationalisms appropriated Western insights and the insights of Marxism-Leninism, placing them in the context of a Third World perspective formulated from the colonial situation.  Thus, I came to understand that the Third World movements of national liberation were developing from below an alternative world-system and an alternative epistemology.  I came to believe that the neocolonized peoples of the world are showing us in the North the way, with respect to political action, understanding the world, and understanding of understanding itself.

      From 1976 to 1978, stimulated by my previous encounter with Black Nationalism, I studied the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan.  I was investigating the question of the possibility of objective knowledge of the social world, given the fact, by then clear to me, that understandings are rooted in social position.  Drawing upon Lonergan’s concepts of “the desire to know,” “personal encounter” and “horizon,” I arrived at the conclusion that we intellectuals of the North are able to arrive at a universal human understanding, if we encounter the social movements formed by the neocolonized peoples of the Third World.  I continue to believe that this provides an important piece to the epistemological dilemmas of our time, particularly in that it provides a methodological guideline for intellectuals of the North in the context of a just and necessary transformation of the world-system from below.

     It seems to me that Wallerstein has arrived at the point of understanding what we social scientists, who are organized principally as social scientists of the North, ought to do: we need to reunify knowledge, and to formulate epistemological assumptions and methodological rules that would be integral to a reunified historical social science; and we need to develop understandings that clarify the structural crisis and contradictions of the world-system, in order to made clear the historical choices that humanity today confronts.  At the same time, it seems to me that Wallerstein has not seen that we social scientists of the North are not in a social position that would enable us to accomplish this task, trapped as we are in fragmented disciplines and academic bureaucratic structures and isolated as we are from the political and revolutionary discourses of the Third World.  And he has not seen that that the fulfillment of this task is in fact occurring among social scientists, historians and intellectuals of the Third World, who are part of a social and political project that is developing an alternative more just and democratic world-system.  The great advances in social scientific understanding, beginning with Marx, have been formulated for most part outside the structures of higher education in the nations of the North; they have been and are being formulated by charismatic leaders and intellectuals of the social movements of the Third World, whose insights have been marginalized by the structures of knowledge in the universities of the North.  Wallerstein’s work is an exception to this general pattern, an exception made possible by his encounter with African nationalism.

      I will address these issues in subsequent posts for the next two or three weeks.  The posts will seek to provide a critical analysis of the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, whose “world-systems analysis” provides a starting point for the necessary reunification and reorganization of knowledge as well as an intellectual foundation for the necessary popular revolutionary transformation of the North.  I will stand with Wallerstein in affirming that we can know the true and the right, or at least important components of it, and that grand narratives are necessary and unavoidable, but I will differ from the master in asserting that the alternative universal understanding of the true and the right is emerging from below, in places that we have been taught to least expect.


References

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 

__________.  1979.  The Capitalist World Economy.  New York:  Cambridge University Press. 

__________.  1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1990.  "Antisystemic Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis

Posted March 26, 2014

​      In the public discourses of the North, there is a pervasive tendency to overlook (1) the significance of colonialism in creating development and underdevelopment in the capitalist world-economy, and (2) the role of neocolonial structures in maintaining these global structures of inequality (see “Overcoming the colonial denial” 7/29/2013).  But Immanuel Wallerstein has managed to escape this Eurocentrism. 

     Wallerstein has written that he came to understand the significance of European colonial domination during his personal encounter in Africa of the African nationalist movement during its drive for independence from European colonial rule in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Referring to this encounter in 1974, Wallerstein notes that he listened to “the angry analyses and optimist passions of young militants of the African movements,” and this led him to conclude that Europeans resident in Africa and the African nationalists “approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks.”  The African nationalists, Wallerstein concluded, “saw the reality in which they lived as a ‘colonial situation,’” fundamentally different from and opposed to the “colonial mentality” of the Europeans (1974:4).

      In Wallerstein’s Africa: The Politics of Independence, originally published in 1961, we can see the extent to which his understanding indeed was shaped by an African nationalist perspective.  The first chapter is devoted to what Wallerstein describes as the impressive achievements in African history before the Europeans came (2005: 11-26).  In the second chapter, he turns to the arrival of the Europeans, and he notes that the European powers had a variety of motives in expanding and in establishing “permanent colonial rule,” and first is the “search for markets and resources” (2005:31).  He then proceeds to discuss the importance of the colonial situation: 

      Wallerstein proceeds to describe the multiple dimensions of the colonial situation.  Of primary importance was the economic dimension, involving the importation of manufactured goods and the exportation of raw materials on a base of forced labor, using methods such as the imposition of quotas on village chiefs or the head tax.  This was accompanied by an educational dimension, which created a Western educated elite among the colonized, an educated elite that ultimately would form a nationalist movement that rejected both the traditional authority of the chiefs as well as European colonial authority.  And a transportation infrastructure was developed that linked Africa to the outside world rather than connecting towns and cities within Africa, thus serving colonial interests rather than promoting the development of Africa (2005:31-45).

      Wallerstein perceives the African nationalist movements as revolutionary, because they seek fundamental systemic change, involving an overthrow of the colonial government (2005:58).  He discerns the significance of “national heroes” with charismatic authority, although he sees a rift between the charismatic leader and the intellectuals, and he believes that the leader becomes removed from the people after independence (2005:98-101). 

      Wallerstein was aware in 1961 that political independence did not change the economic relation involving the exportation of raw materials on a basis of cheap labor and the importation of manufactured goods, thus establishing neocolonialism (2005:137-43).  He developed this further in his second book, Africa: The Politics of Unity, originally published in 1967, where he describes not only the preservation of the colonial economic relation but also the declining terms of trade.   He writes:

     Wallerstein noted in 1961 the efforts of newly independent governments to overcome the neocolonial situation through African unity and by seeking a diversity of trading partners (2005:103-7, 142-51).  The quest for unity, from Pan-Africanism to the Organization of African Unity, would become the central theme of his 1967 book.

     Wallerstein discussed in 1961 the emergence of African socialism, a perspective that views socialism in Africa as different from socialism in Europe or Asia.  Especially important is the fact that African socialism rejects the concept of the class struggle, since the great majority of the population are peasants, and inasmuch as the small percentage of property owners, merchants and professionals in the towns had not acquired bourgeois or petit bourgeois consciousness and continued to maintain relations and obligations with extended families in the countryside (2005:148-49).  In 1967, Wallerstein observes that the term “African socialism” was originally formulated by the most radical and revolutionary of the African nationalists, who wanted to distinguish socialism in Africa from scientific socialism, in accordance with their orientation toward the attainment of African intellectual and cultural autonomy.  However, “African socialism” began to be used by leaders and governments that were adapting to neocolonialism and were not revolutionary, so that its meaning became vague.  As a result, revolutionary African nationalists began to reject the term and to speak of scientific socialism applied to the conditions of Africa (2005:II 230-36).

     In the 1961 book, Wallerstein also discerns that Africa is developing an alternative theory and practice of democracy.  He maintains that the African form of democracy is not characterized by liberal freedoms in regard to opposition groups, because in the African context opposition parties tend to undermine national integration, which has not yet been accomplished, inasmuch as the newly independent African nations combined multiple traditional African nations and identities, the so-called “tribes.”  However, the African political process, Wallerstein maintains, is characterized by popular participation and free discussion (2005:153-61).

      Thus, by the 1960s, Wallerstein arrived at an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa as a result of his personal encounter with the African nationalist movement.  His appropriation of African nationalist insights in his formulation of world-systems analysis will be the subject of the next post.


References

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  2005.  Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.  [Combines into one edition Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967)].


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, Africa, African nationalism, African socialism