from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part III)

(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] 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.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic 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.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize 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.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...