Before the Russian Revolution, to most observers in Asia
and Africa, Westernization meant the capitalist democratic
civilization of western Europe and the United
States, not the doctrine of social revolution developed by
Karl Marx. Until 1917, Marxism was regarded as a utopian
idea rather than a concrete system of government.
Moreover, Marxism appeared to have little relevance to
conditions in Asia and Africa. Marxist doctrine, after all,
declared that a communist society could arise only from
the ashes of an advanced capitalism that had already
passed through the stage of industrial revolution. From
the perspective of Marxist historical analysis, most societies
in Asia and Africa were still at the feudal stage of
development; they lacked the economic conditions and
political awareness to achieve a socialist revolution that
would bring the working class to power. Finally, the
Marxist view of nationalism and religion had little appeal
to many patriotic intellectuals in the non-Western world.
Marx believed that nationhood and religion were essentially
false ideas that diverted the attention of the oppressed
masses from the critical issues of class struggle
and, in his phrase, the exploitation of one person by another.
Instead, Marx stressed the importance of an “internationalist”
outlook based on class consciousness and the
eventual creation of a classless society with no artificial
divisions based on culture, nation, or religion.
The situation began to change after the Russian Revolution
in 1917. The rise to power of Lenin’s Bolsheviks
demonstrated that a revolutionary party espousing Marxist
principles could overturn a corrupt, outdated system
and launch a new experiment dedicated to ending human
inequality and achieving a paradise on earth. In 1920,
Lenin proposed a new revolutionary strategy designed
to relate Marxist doctrine and practice to non-Western
societies. His reasons were not entirely altruistic. Soviet
Russia, surrounded by capitalist powers, desperately
needed allies in its struggle to survive in a hostile world.
To Lenin, the anticolonial movements emerging in
North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East afterWorldWar I
were natural allies of the beleaguered new regime in
Moscow. Lenin was convinced that only the ability of the
imperialist powers to find markets, raw materials, and
sources of capital investment in the non-Western world
kept capitalism alive. If the tentacles of capitalist influence
in Asia and Africa could be severed, imperialism itself
would ultimately weaken and collapse.
Establishing such an alliance was not easy, however.
Most nationalist leaders in colonial countries belonged to
the urban middle class, and many abhorred the idea of a
comprehensive revolution to create a totally egalitarian
society. In addition, many still adhered to traditional religious
beliefs and were opposed to the atheistic principles
of classical Marxism.
Since it was unrealistic to expect bourgeois support for
social revolution, Lenin sought a compromise by which
Communist parties could be organized among the working
classes in the preindustrial societies of Asia and Africa.
These parties would then forge informal alliances
with existing middle-class nationalist parties to struggle
against the remnants of the traditional ruling class and
Western imperialism. Such an alliance, of course, could
not be permanent because many bourgeois nationalists in
Asia and Africa would reject an egalitarian, classless society.
Once the imperialists had been overthrown, therefore,
the Communist parties would turn against their erstwhile
nationalist partners to seize power on their own and
carry out the socialist revolution. Lenin thus proposed a
two-stage revolution: an initial “national democratic”
stage followed by a “proletarian socialist” stage.Lenin’s strategy became a major element in Soviet
foreign policy in the 1920s. Soviet agents fanned out
across the world to carry Marxism beyond the boundaries
of industrial Europe. The primary instrument of this effort
was the Communist International, or Comintern
for short. Formed in 1919 at Lenin’s prodding, the Comintern
was a worldwide organization of Communist parties
dedicated to the advancement of world revolution.
At its headquarters in Moscow, agents from around the
world were trained in the precepts of world communism
and then sent back to their own countries to form
Marxist parties and promote the cause of social revolution.
By the end of the 1920s, almost every colonial or
semicolonial society in Asia had a party based on Marxist
principles. The Soviets had less success in the Middle
East, where Marxist ideology appealed mainly to minorities
such as Jews and Armenians in the cities, or in sub-
Saharan Africa, where Soviet strategists in any case did
not feel conditions were sufficiently advanced for the creation
of Communist organizations.
According to Marxist doctrine, the rank and file of
Communist parties should be urban workers alienated
from capitalist society by inhumane working conditions.
In practice, many of the leading elements even in European
Communist parties tended to be intellectuals or
members of the lower middle class (in Marxist parlance,
the “petty bourgeoisie”). That phenomenon was even
more apparent in the non-Western world, where most
early Marxists were rootless intellectuals. Some were
probably drawn into the movement for patriotic reasons
and saw Marxist doctrine as a new and more effective
means of modernizing their societies and removing
the power of exploitative colonialism (see the box
above). Others were attracted by the utopian dream of a
classless society. For those who had lost their faith in traditional
religion, it often served as a new secular ideology,
dealing not with the hereafter but with the here and now.
All who joined found it a stirring message of release from
oppression and a practical strategy for the liberation of
their society from colonial rule.
Of course, the new doctrine’s appeal was not the same
in all non-Western societies. In Confucian societies such
as China and Vietnam, where traditional belief systems
had been badly discredited by their failure to counter the
Western challenge, communism had an immediate impact
and rapidly became a major factor in the anticolonial
movement. In Buddhist and Muslim societies, where
traditional religion remained strong and actually became
a cohesive factor within the resistance movement, communism
had less success and was forced to adapt to local
conditions to survive.
Sometimes, as in Malaya (where the sense of nationhood
was weak) or Thailand (which, alone in Southeast
Asia, had not fallen under colonial rule), support for the
local Communist Party came from minority groups such
as the overseas Chinese community. To maximize their
appeal and minimize potential conflict with traditional
ideas, Communist parties frequently attempted to adjust
Marxist doctrine to indigenous values and institutions.
In the Middle East, for example, the Ba’ath Party in Syria
adopted a hybrid socialism combining Marxism with
Arab nationalism. In Africa, radical intellectuals talked
vaguely of a uniquely “African road to socialism.”
The degree to which these parties were successful in
establishing alliances with existing nationalist parties
also varied from place to place. In some instances, the local
Communists were briefly able to establish a cooperative
relationship with bourgeois parties in the struggle
against Western imperialism. The most famous example
was the alliance between the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) and Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (discussed in
the next section). In the Dutch East Indies, the Indonesian
Communist Party (known as the PKI) allied with
the middle-class nationalist group Sarekat Islam but later
broke loose in an effort to organize its own mass movement
among the poor peasants. Similar problems were
encountered in French Indochina, where Vietnamese
Communists organized by the Moscow-trained revolutionary
Ho Chi Minh sought to cooperate with bourgeois
nationalist parties against the colonial regime. In 1928,
all such efforts were abandoned when the Comintern, reacting
to Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the alliance with
the Chinese Communist Party, declared that Communist
parties should restrict their recruiting efforts to the most
revolutionary elements in society—notably, the urban
intellectuals and the working class. Harassed by colonial
authorities and saddled with strategic directions from
Moscow that often had little relevance to local conditions,
Communist parties in most colonial societies had
little success in the 1930s and failed to build a secure base
of support among the mass of the population.
World History
