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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.
When OPEC raised the price of oil in October 1973, purportedly as a political weapon over the Yom Kippur war, it did not do so as a challenge to imperialism. Indeed, despite the confrontationist rhetoric of Gaddafi and others, OPEC's Saudi anchor derived advantages for the U.S. government in an intraimperialist show of force. In 1971 , when President Nixon delinked the dollar from the gold standard, the administration puzzled over strategies to exert power over the global economy. One of these was a rise in the oil price, which would, the Nixon administration surmised, do at least two things for the United States: put an immense squeeze on the two main economic competitors, Western Europe and Japan; and earn profits for the oil lands, which would, in all probability, be recycled into U.S. financial institutions because the Gulf states, at least, did not have adequate productive capacity to absorb the petro-profits. The elimination of capital controls in the U. S . economy by 1974 further facilitated the recycling of these petro-profits (then held almost exclusively in dollars), and therefore the global enhancement of the status of the dollar as the instrument of "hard currency." Since the oil states held their main currency reserves in dollars, it behooved them to help stabilize the U. S . economy (and work against the depreciation of the dollar, which contributed to the deindustrialization of the United States). The 1973 price rise certainly improved the position of the oil lands momentarily, but in the long run it benefited the U.S. government and the major transnational firms that did business in dollars. Despite the best intentions of the public cartel, then, it did not necessarily inconvenience or challenge the structure of imperialism.
the financial component of this is really fascinating (and quite key imo)
[...] Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristocratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
generalising from Tanzania
The ujamaa program began with the assumption that the national liberation regime should create a democratic economy that worked in the interests of the vast mass of the people. Since most of the people in the formerly colonized world in general and in Tanzania in particular lived rural lives, Nyerere's 1961 slogan resonated with them: "While other countries aim to reach the moon we must aim for the time being, at any rate, to reach the village." Whatever Nyerere's intentions and those of the many Third World governments that had similar agricultural schemes (from Algeria to Burma, and on), the move to consolidate agriculture had the net effect of trying to control the peasantry, to agglomerate peasant production under the domination of the national liberation state. Once collected, peasant production in the Third World would now be made subservient to the dynamics of world trade (and imperialism) rather than the subsistence needs of the localities that could have governed their development. To render the relatively autonomous petty commodity sector subservient to the state, the regime abolished the marketing cooperative movement in 1975. Formed to gain better prices for agricultural produce (notably cotton), the movement brought some benefits to the peasantry. But the state decided to buy directly from the growers, often at prices set by the central government. Additionally, in 1972, the regime adopted the counsel of the U.S. consulting agency, McKinsey and Co., which advised it to replace the local government agencies with "development teams" that reported directly to central government ministries. These teams, wrote a scholar at the University of Dar es Salaam, "effectively replaced the local government system with an elaborate system of vertical information and planning flows centralized to the higher echelons of the government and party."
aaaaah what a mess
[...] Instead of doing much to turn the divide around, the state simply tried to siphon more welfare toward the poor. Short of socialism, the national liberation state in places like India wanted to produce higher growth rates. As output increased, regardless of the means to do so, the state would have a larger aggregate pool of capital and resources to distribute to the population. Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrialize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management class. Deliberation was kept to a minimum. Socialism made its appearance in the marketplace and on the threshing floor - to more equitably divide the spoils rather than to more equitably produce them in the first place.
i like this juxtapositional framing
Industrial, agricultural, and financial elites who gained through several decades of import-substitution policies now outgrew their training wheels and restraints. Reasonable growth and considerable accumulation by this class gave them the confidence to exert their own class interests over the needs of their population. Many of the most aggressive leaders of this class had been born toward the end of the era of full-blown imperialism. They had experienced neither colonialism nor anticolonialism. The structures that enabled them to flourish now seemed to be shackles. The intellectual leaders of this class spent time in international institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) . Here, these intellectuals experienced the change from a Keynesian development model (that the state should intervene to create demand by social welfare and social wage policies) to a monetarist accumulation one (that the state should withdraw to the simple function of managing the money supply and ensuring low levels of inflation). People such as India's Montek Ahluwalia and Manmohan Singh as well as Venezuela's Moises Nairn and Miguel Rodriquez are good examples of this tendency. In addition, migrants to the advanced industrial states who made good turned their capital and expertise to the homeland during the era of stagflation in their host countries; people such as India' s Sam Pitroda and Taiwan's Miin Wu brought their skills and worldview to bear on the development of the new information technology sector in their homelands. This infusion of skills and business philosophies enthused the emergent bourgeoisie in the darker nations, which saw the future through their eyes rather than the lens of the Third World agenda. This class was not motivated to become an economic proxy for the Atlantic powers. It believed in its capacity and wanted the opportunity to flourish.
noooo
this almost reminds me of that line from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which itself echoes a line from The Diamond Age) about the children of revolutionaries