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Who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image! By Havana, all the powers of the old empire had entered into a holy alliance to demolish the virus of anticolonial Third World nationalism; while John Bull and the Gaullists trembled at their fate in a world dominated by those they had once ruled, Uncle Sam lent his shoulders and wiles to keep things as close to the past as possible. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the heirs of Uncle Joe saw promise in the movements of the Third World, and even while they offered assistance to them, they did so with every attempt to steer the ship of history, rather than to share the rudder. Direction was anathema to the darker nations, which had been told what to do for far too long. Time now to deliver oneself to the future.
this is pretty, esp by the end
[...] Fanon defended the right of national liberation movements to adopt armed struggle, as the movements would do at Havana's 1966 Tricontinental. His defense, however, was not on tactical or even strategic grounds; he maintained that violence is necessary to wrench a colonized society into freedom and reshape the subservience of the colonized so that they might truly be freed by the act of taking their freedom. [...]
in Wretched
[...] the FLN failed the legions of anticolonial supporters who wanted a role in the creation of a new Algeria. The FLN's charter did not fully support the energy of the people; it was keener to demobilize this enthusiasm. The Third World "nation" did not fully live up to its promise of radical democracy, where every person would be constituted by the state as a citizen, and where each citizen in turn would act through the state to construct a national society, economy, and culture. From India to Egypt, from Ghana to Indonesia-the great legions of the Third World drew their immense strength from popular mobilization, but none of these states enabled the people who created the platform for freedom to have an equal part in the project to build it. Of course, the construction of the new nation would require the labor of the people, but this work came with direction from above, and not with the co-equal participation of the people in the creation of the national plan or the division of the national surplus. The people had to act, not to lead but to take orders, and the state, the father figure, would protect its feminized subjects.
In March 1 963, Ben Bella's government promulgated a set of laws known as the March Decrees. These had been created in consultation with a group of European and Arab Trotskyites (including the Egyptian Luftallah Solliman, the Moroccan Mohammed Tahiri, and the Algerian Mohammed Harbi) who favored worker self-management. The decrees declared any vacant property to be legitimate collective property, legalized worker self-management on farms and in factories, and forbade speculation. The workers had already seized the vacant factories, and the peasantry had already grabbed three million hectares of prime land left by the French colon farmers. The new government institutionalized the inventiveness of the workers and the farmers. So far so good, but then the state made some errors. Whereas it had written no role for the state in these new institutions, it also tried to cut out the main trade union federation, the two-hundred-thousand-strong Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens (UGTA) that had led the factory takeover. [...]
hmmm kinda cool bit of history
The demobilization of the population led almost inexorably within the Third World to military coups and military rule. Where the military did not overthrow the civilian government, the inability of states to break from colonial borders and other such dilemmas led to a strengthened military brass. More money to guns meant less to butter, and therefore to an impoverished agenda for the increase of the social wage, the improvement of agricultural and other social relations, and better prices for exported commodities. The main social agency that demanded this agenda within the constraints of the Third World regime remained the Communists, and it was the strengthened hand of the military that often exorcised the Left (helped out by the CIA and given a blind eye by the USSR) . The broader story of these tragedies occupies us in this part, as we make our way from the military coup in La Paz, Bolivia, to the massacre of the Communists of the Indonesian archipelago, to the border war between India and China, and eventually to the reduction of the Third World's political and economic agenda into OPEC and the ujamaa villages of Tanzania. Neocolonial imperialism persisted, and the countries of the Third World remained in thrall to economic and political logics that disinherited most of them. The people wanted the formal trappings of freedom rather than flag independence (the Tanzanians called it uhuru wa hendera) . They had to settle for mild reforms and nostalgia. Or else be "disappeared."
Despite this massive growth, the PKI under Aidit did not make any move to take state power. The labor unions seized control of Dutch owned firms in late 1 957, but that was as far as they would go. In 1 957-58, in Sumatra and Sulawesi, the military and the right wing joined together to create liberated areas and arrest PKI cadres. Instead of using this as an opportunity to crack down on the old social classes and the military, the PKI leadership put its faith in Sukarno. Aidit followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power. This was the dominant position articulated by the Soviet Union and the Chinese, who gave support to Communist parties as long as they maintained an alliance with the progressive section of the national bourgeoisie. On the basis of this premise, Aidit articulated a four-part strategy: to enlarge the party and its mass organizations, constrain or win over the progressive sections of the national elite, "use" Sukarno's move to the Left, and neutralize the armed forces.5 The PKI was able to both grow and make a connection with Sukarno, but it was not able to insinuate itself into the imagination of the national elite or make a crack in the armed forces.
useful reminder
(i think he mentions, later on, the potential pitfalls with this strategy - does it create conditions that eventually threaten the viability of any left project?)
[...] Monies spent on the military do not create a multiplier effect on the rest of the economy in terms of social development. Indeed, military expenditure in the Third World distorts the national economic pledge to reverse the imperial drain and create a national economy whose incentive is social equity. Instead, the military expenditure drains capital toward the production of the means of destruction, begins to waste precious foreign exchange on the import of military technology, and destroys regional cooperation. One of the main levers to upturn the project of the Third World is militarization.
As if testing Uslar-Pietri' s thesis, in December 1936, the oil workers at the Maracaibo fields went on strike for better daily wages, better housing, and salary parity between Venezuelans and foreigners; the regime joined with the oil companies to refuse the demands, sent in the police, and decreed a mediocre rise in the daily wage as a sop. The oil industry created an industrial proletariat, but their numbers remained low in this capital-intensive industry. When the oil workers made demands on their flushed proprietors, they earned no redress. The foreign (mainly U.S.) management recycled prejudices that did not answer the aspirations of the workers. The vice president of Venezuelan Gulf, W. T. Wallace, felt that there was no need to take care of these workers because "the native mind" cannot "conform to the accepted method of living, "and if the workers do try to make their surroundings inhabitable, this comes "not on a real desire to conform to American practices, but from a desire to try to get something for nothing."
"something from nothing" -___-
[...] when Venezuela took action against the Seven Sisters in the 1960s, one commentator described the transfer of power in this way: "A planning apparatus and state-owned heavy industry complexes (a steel mill and aluminium industry in the Guayana province; petrochemical complexes in the northwest) were established. These further expanded and strengthened the position of the bureaucracy as an independent social force. But this did not give them control of the economic development process as a whole." The Venezuelan state and the domestic bourgeoisie took charge of the extraction of the oil, but they did not control the process. They still had to cooperate with the Seven Sisters, which continued to exert enormous pressure on the oil industry. In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
If the public cartels and the strategy of asset nationalization did not always benefit the tropical working class, it should be said that the strategy also did not benefit those countries that did not have access to the higher-priced primary products. When OPEC maintained its price for oil, the darker nations without oil had a much higher import bill for the one energy source that had become indispensable for contemporary capitalism. While the radical members of OPEC, such as Libya in the early 1970s, did call for differential prices for the various nations of the world, OPEC's strictly economic vision precluded any such political arrangement. The only time OPEC openly indulged in a political battle was over the defense of Palestine, but even here Arab unity could not be counted on In general, commodity cartels did not always help the Third World and hurt the advanced industrial states: the latter often dominate the production of certain primary goods, such as agricultural commodities grown on factory farms by megacorporations, whereas the former often produce manufactured goods. High oil prices hurt the Third World states that have no domestic oil reserves, just as any cartel would only help those that have the commodity protected by it and not the others. Whereas the cartel approach certainly emboldened states, it did not have a general political strategy to build power in the totality of the Third World.