Marx's Ghost Wandering Through Asia, Africa and Latin America, and Some Stories Rarely Told

From anti-colonialism to anti-neo-colonialism; from opposing the security treaty to opposing the new one.

While liberals and socialists all over Europe were denouncing the Paris Commune, Marx saw an opportunity.

As the historian Jacques Barzun tells it, "the Communards were neither proletarians nor communists. The 'urban republic' they wanted to establish across the rest of France was the exact opposite of Marx's program of centralized dictatorship." Even so, Marx judged correctly that "this event made the armed worker famous throughout the world." Karl Marx, far off in London, "saw that the moment for a political strike had come, and perhaps also recognized the value of the name. So he published a pamphlet describing the uprising as an attempted rehearsal of the coming class struggle — the proletariat awakened, on the verge of establishing communism."

It was a dress rehearsal. Whether or not the people who later called themselves Marxists would have won Marx's approval, they all learned this much: pick the thing up and use it as a tool — "this vivid image could be used to stir up the next revolution."

When Hobsbawm looked back in the 1980s at the global national-liberation movements that began in the 1930s, he found that the Marxism he believed in had played only a bit part in them. Most of the time it was simply a device for stirring up nationalism. Much as Marx had reached out and picked up the Paris Commune.

It comes back to the same line: All that is solid melts into air.

Colonialists read that line as loss. The men driving the national-liberation movements surely read vitality into it. What they stood to lose was only their chains, and what they stood to gain was the whole world.

The people who felt this most keenly were, as it happens, the ones who had studied the civilized world inside mother countries like Britain and France. Gandhi, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Jinnah, Nehru, Lee Kuan Yew — lawyers, teachers, intellectuals of one kind or another, heirs to Western civilization.

And then they became the mother country's greatest enemies.

Nkrumah was one of them.

1. Kwame Nkrumah in Africa

By the time Kwame Nkrumah came onto the scene, Africa's colonial independence movements were already more than 30 years old — counting from Egypt in 1922, and taking place mostly in the Arab region north of the Sahara. Before returning to the Gold Coast in 1947 to throw himself into the independence movement, he studied law in Britain. There he came under the influence of left-wing politics, made friends among British Communists, and joined anti-colonial protests. He said that in Britain he had become a "Marxian Socialist."

The Gold Coast was the name British colonizers left behind for the place. In 1957, after years of self-government, it became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to break free of European colonial rule, and it renamed itself Ghana — after an 11th-century West African empire.

But Ghana's independence was only a beginning. Nkrumah said: "If our independence cannot be linked to the liberation of the whole African continent, then it means nothing."

A doctrine called Pan-Africanism turned Ghana into a base for supporting national-independence movements across the whole of Africa. The year after independence, Nkrumah called Black political parties, unions and student groups from all over Africa to the All-African People's Conference in the capital, Accra, to work out together what a "non-violent African revolution" would look like — inspiring a generation of independence pioneers. By 1960 more than 20 African countries had won independence, and Ghana deserved much of the credit.

In 1963, Nkrumah joined with 31 newly born African states to found the Organization of African Unity, which went on supporting national-independence movements across the continent. It was the forerunner of today's African Union. In the preamble to the organization's charter, Nkrumah used for the first time a concept he had coined, "neo-colonialism" — former colonies that had won independence in name, but whose economies and cultures stayed under foreign control.

Nkrumah never made Marxism Ghana's official program, but he did try to unhook Ghana's economy from the world capitalist system and pursue industrialization and modernization on his own terms. At the same time he worked to bring Third World countries together.

The Non-Aligned Movement grew out of this. Building on the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Nkrumah joined with Tito of Yugoslavia, Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt in 1961 to launch it. By then the Eastern and Western blocs were already split by an "Iron Curtain" and facing each other down, and small countries were expected to join one side or the other for their own safety. The Non-Aligned Movement's call was different: the "Third World" should stand on its own feet and be no bloc's client.

These newly independent countries ran the ideological spectrum from left to right, and they papered over their differences as best they could in order to stand together. Some were Marxist, like China; some backed capitalism hard, like the Philippines. Many more sat in the middle, embracing socialisms of every description — "Arab Socialism," "African Socialism," Gandhi's "Sarvodaya" (the welfare of all), or Sukarno's "NASAKOM," a fusion of nationalism, religion and communism. They tended to preach equality and keep their hierarchies.

The Non-Aligned Movement's core backers, these leaders of national-liberation movements, would soon be seen by Marxists at home as spokesmen for the bourgeoisie and the landlord class. In the eyes of the latter, real decolonization and real national liberation could only come after the machinery of global capitalist exploitation had been smashed, and class struggle was the only road there.

Rulers as willing as Nkrumah to unhook themselves from capitalism were, after all, a minority. And in the end he could not hold off his own taste for absolute power either — he pushed a personality cult, put down workers' strikes, enacted the Preventive Detention Act, and in 1964 turned Ghana into a one-party state. In 1966 a US-backed military coup overthrew him, and he went into exile in Guinea.

But "Nkrumahism" is still alive. In April 2018, when Ghana's government signed a military cooperation agreement with the United States allowing it to use Ghanaian airports, a youth group calling itself "Nkrumahists" came out to protest. They attacked the government as a puppet of neo-colonialism, and pointed out that Ghana's economy — GDP growth of 8.5% in 2017, but made up almost entirely of foreign-owned extractive industries in oil and minerals — was itself a neo-colonial economy. "Our task is to smash it." For today's Nkrumahists, "decolonization" is still an important tool for saying no to the world.

2. If Chris Hani Were Still Alive

Chris Hani did not live to see apartheid abolished in South Africa. On April 10, 1993 — less than a year before the election that would make Mandela South Africa's first Black president — he was shot dead in front of his own home by a neo-Nazi Polish immigrant and an accomplice.

Twelve days after the killing, Jacques Derrida began giving two lectures at the University of California, answering the question of "What is to be done with Marxism?" now that the Soviet Union had collapsed and history had "ended." The lectures became the book Specters of Marx (Spectres de Marx), which Derrida dedicated to Hani, calling him "a communist as a communist."

Many believe that had he still been on the political stage, he was the man most likely to become South Africa's second president after Mandela.

The South African Communist Party was founded in 1921. This white workers' party started out with a slogan that ran flat against the mission of Hani's generation — "Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa." Seven years later it was calling for Black majority rule, and it became a long-term ally of the African National Congress in the struggle. After apartheid fell, the ANC also shared political power with the SACP for years.

More than 90 years on from that founding, and 23 years after South Africa abolished apartheid, the country is often held up now as a failed model of modernization: 55% of the population still lives below the poverty line; the unemployment rate is among the ten highest in the world; more than 12% of the population is HIV-positive; public safety is bad. The great majority of the land is still in white hands, a sizeable share of Black residents have no secure right to where they live and can be evicted at any time, and land conflicts break out again and again. Over these 20-odd years a set of Black elites has used political connections to become newly minted capitalists, joining the white rich man's club and paying no attention to the hardships of their own people. Former President Jacob Zuma raised corruption to a new level, and the press gave his conduct a name of its own: "state capture." Some say the ANC has spent down every last bit of the moral capital it earned fighting apartheid.

Because he was murdered on the eve of democratization, and because he belonged to both the ANC and the South African Communist Party, Chris Hani has become a convenient symbol for anyone unhappy with the state of the country to use against the present.

It is said that when he joined the Communist Party at 19 he already understood that "national liberation, though necessary, will not bring complete economic liberation" — a line that reads as a prophecy of where Black South Africans stand today. Shortly before he was killed, asked whether he wanted a seat in the cabinet of the new democratic government, he said that for a country, "what is important is not who is in the cabinet ... what matters is that the struggle continues, and what we do to improve the social conditions of the working masses."

In that dedication, Derrida noted that before the assassination Hani had already set down his important duties in the ANC, and probably a post in the democratic government about to be formed, meaning to give all his energy to the Communist Party. That, Derrida wrote, was why he had become "dangerous, and suddenly intolerable."

National independence has been won, but when does the "social revolution" arrive that would fix a warped system of distribution? When people ask "What if Hani were still here?" what they are really asking is: "Where is economic transformation?" "Where is the real Communist Party?"

3. Frantz Fanon and the Violent Sartre

This brings to mind what Frantz Fanon wrote about "neo-colonialism." Fanon was born on Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, and was a psychiatrist, a Marxist, a postcolonial theorist and a participant in the Algerian independence movement. In The Wretched of the Earth, the book he finished before his death in 1961, he argued that the so-called national bourgeoisie was a group "colonized" in both its thinking and its economic life: pleasure-seeking, lacking even the appetite for risk and the inventiveness of the European bourgeoisie, wanting nothing more than to step into the colonizer's shoes and enjoy the same material rewards. If they took power, the colony, independent on paper, would still be controlled by the former mother country, stuck in a "neo-colonial" condition. The real hope for revolution, he believed, lay with the peasants and the urban "lumpenproletariat." Marx had thought those people backward and politically unconscious; Fanon pinned his hopes on them, on their using violence to break the machinery of colonial exploitation for good and win real liberation. Decolonization, as he saw it, was never just a matter of running up a new flag. It meant winning genuine economic and cultural independence. It meant "creating new men."

Or, in the words of another Marxist of the same years, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in the preface he wrote for The Wretched of the Earth in 1961: "In order to fight against us [that is, the former mother country], the former colony must fight against itself."

In the same preface Sartre wrote another passage, this one full of murder: to kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone, destroying an oppressor and the man he oppresses at once; what is left is a dead man and a free man; and the survivor feels, for the first time, his own two feet on his nation's soil.

4. Marxism in India: Kerala's Utopia and Naxalite Terror

Gandhi — who studied law in Britain, practiced as a lawyer in South Africa, could not stomach the oppression of colonialism and came to be honored as the "Mahatma" — chose "non-violent non-cooperation" as his strategy for winning national independence.

"The English want us to match them in the power of machine guns, but that is a weapon they have and we do not. Our only chance of beating them is to match them with a weapon we have and they do not."

By 1957, India had become the world's most populous democracy. That year, Marxists in the southern state of Kerala gave up the road of armed revolution, accepted parliamentary politics and formed the world's second elected Communist government. (In 1945, Communists had already won an election in San Marino, the city-state inside Italy.) They took turns in power with a coalition led by the Congress Party, and reportedly did produce real results in the state on poverty, health and education — even caste consciousness nearly vanished there.

In 1967, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had split from the CPI, won elections in West Bengal and joined the government there. But it did not stand with the local peasant movement demanding land reform. That movement's uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in the Darjeeling area, produced a string of small Maoist armed groups known as "Naxalites," who have kept to guerrilla war ever since, trying to bring down the Indian government and carry out a Chinese-style revolution. The Indian government lists them as a terrorist organization and calls them "the most serious internal security threat."

Arundhati Roy — India's sharpest dissident and the writer who won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things — interviewed the Naxalites of central India in 2010 and published the long report Walking With the Comrades, saying that she does not support violence but would support the Naxalites even if it landed her in prison. In the book she points out that the Naxalites grew strong there because the government sold companies the mining and forestry rights to the hills where these people live, threatening their survival. The reason they never took the Gandhian road, she writes, is that even Gandhian resistance needs an "audience" — and here, nobody is listening at all.

5. The Filmmakers Solanas and Getino

"Third Cinema" was a Marxist film movement launched in 1968 by the Argentine directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, which went on to sweep Latin America. The manifesto the two men wrote quoted Marx and Fanon and argued that revolutionary cinema was not about using film to record a revolution but about using film to lead the Third World's revolution against imperialism.

Their three-part documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (Hora de los Hornos), released in 1968, is the representative work of this Third World revolutionary cinema. Its opening narration introduces the starting point of neo-colonialism in Latin America this way:

"Latin America's independence was betrayed the moment it was born."

In 1826, the same year that Simón Bolívar, liberator of South America, won a decisive victory over Spain, Argentina's newly installed first president signed a strange loan agreement with a British bank that handed control of the national bank to the British. From then on,

"England replaced Spain in control of the whole continent. What it once had to take with weapons, it now took with loans. Argentina exported wool and imported textiles; it exported meat and hides and imported grand pianos. The export bourgeoisie became from then on an agricultural appendage of European industry. For the first time in history a new form of domination was applied to Latin America — colonial commercial exploitation carried out through a native bourgeoisie. This was the birth of neo-colonialism."

If globalization really is neo-colonialism, then they got everything right. They had the benefit of a discovery two economists made in 1949.

The theory, known as dependency theory, says that poor countries find their position harder and harder the more business they do with rich ones: the money they earn selling raw materials to developed countries buys less and less of those countries' industrial goods.

Later, other economists found that poor countries were getting poorer precisely because they did business with rich ones, which locked them into a state of "underdevelopment" — a state in which, however hard they worked their natural resources, no real economic development followed. Neoclassical economics could not explain this, because it assumed free trade benefited both sides.

Dependency theory says the cause is inequality between nations: poor countries can only sell cheap raw materials to rich ones, while rich ones sell expensive industrial goods to the poor. What keeps the imbalance in place is often the elite inside the poor country itself, which shares interests with the rich country.

To break the relationship, you either talk those elites into changing course — into no longer using their capital and services to keep the dependency going, and instead investing in their own country's basic needs, or in domestic import substitution (making at home what used to be imported). But that is usually not something you can count on, and so this radical economic theory concludes that the only thing left is revolution: overthrow the elites and design the economy again from scratch.

Luckily it did not turn out quite that way. The globalization that restarted after World War II has produced all sorts of endings. Late-developing countries succeeding while old established developed countries have an uncomfortable time of it — that is happening right now. There is not much we can conclude about globalization at this point. What there is no shortage of — as with the current spectacle of two mercantilist giants fighting over the global leadership of globalization — is absurdity.

6. Allende, the Elected President

But the Western Hemisphere had a different story, at its own pace. First Cuba dramatically set up the hemisphere's first socialist state in 1959, then started exporting revolution in 1965; and thanks to the brutality of the Vietnam War and the adolescent ideological fever of the 1960s, national-liberation movements across Asia, Africa and Latin America surged in every direction.

The man who actually got something done, though, was someone who won an election — and he stole the show from every Marxist around. In 1970, after three tries, Salvador Allende, the candidate of Chile's Popular Unity coalition, became Latin America's first Marxist president.

Once in office he set about a socialist remaking of the national economy inside a democratic political framework. Andre Gunder Frank, the well-known dependency theorist and author of Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (translated into Chinese in the 1990s), took part in the reforms. One of Allende's measures was to nationalize a number of US-owned copper mines without compensation, on the grounds that their profit margins over many years had exceeded the ceiling set by Chilean law. The government also bought up private mining companies and factories, along with large plantations, the latter to be handed to farmers' cooperatives. He announced steep wage increases and froze prices, and printed money on a large scale to close the deficit.

Nationalization, plus the empty treasury and the slump that came of printing too much money ... stirred fierce anger in the United States, and in Chile's own congress, courts and middle class.

On September 11, 1973, a coup led by Pinochet ended Allende's utopia. The army attacked the presidential palace; Allende refused to step down, spoke of himself in the past tense in his last radio address, and died inside the palace. To this day some people mark the date as "the other 9/11." It was the world's first military coup carried on television. The footage survives in a 2004 documentary called Salvador Allende, itself one of the representative works of the "Third Cinema" mentioned above.

An aside worth making: after overthrowing Allende's elected government, Pinochet built another "utopia" of his own across 17 years of brutal military dictatorship. He planned the whole country strictly by the laws of the free market, and brought in the Chicago School's high priest, Milton Friedman, to advise him in person — a rare opportunity, as it turned out, even for a free-market liberal.

7. And Pope Francis, Too

Everybody knows Marx's line that "religion is the opium of the people." The American socialist and historian Howard Zinn reminds us that just before it, Marx also wrote:

"Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation." (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843)

That, Zinn says, helps explain how "liberation theology" managed to weld the deep feeling of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in poor rural places.

Liberation theology was a Latin American Catholic movement that rose in the 1960s. Faced with the poverty of the Latin American masses, priests decided that Christian humanism should be practiced in deeds, by caring for the poor, and not only in words. To that end they used Marxism to understand and explain Latin America's widespread and deeply rooted poverty, attacking capitalism and preaching socialism. Some spent years preaching and running social services in poor communities in remote mountains; some organized social movements for fairness; some picked up guns and became guerrillas fighting oppression.

The Ecuadorian priest Ernesto Cardenal worked closely with the Sandinista National Liberation Front against the Somoza family dictatorship, and served as minister of culture in the new socialist government after the revolution won.

Cardenal said: "It was Christ who led me to Marx," and "To me, all four Gospels are equally communist. I am a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom."

The Vatican had an instinctive distaste for theories with atheist genes in them — until 2013, when the Church got a pope thought to be deeply marked by liberation theology: Francis. He comes from Argentina, the first Roman Catholic pope from Latin America.

Since taking office he has called unrestrained capitalism a "new tyranny" and "the dung of the devil," and has called on the faithful again and again to care for the poor, especially refugees, victims of human trafficking and today's forced laborers, while also pressing the case for ecological sustainability and action on climate change. After Trump took office, Francis attacked his policies repeatedly, if obliquely, and came to be seen as the "Anti-Trump."

Asked how he felt about being labeled a "Marxist," Francis said: "I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don't feel offended."

In 2015, Francis invited the 86-year-old Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez to the Vatican, a sign that Rome's official position on liberation theology was softening. Gutiérrez published A Theology of Liberation in 1971, a book regarded as the movement's theoretical classic — and regarded by others as an ideological instrument manufactured by the Soviet KGB.

8. Wim Wenders's The Salt of the Earth and Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement

In Brazil, the Catholic Church raised the flag of liberation theology and supported peasant movements — among them the Landless Workers' Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), which Noam Chomsky called "the most important social movement in the world."

The plantation system left over from Brazil's colonial period, plus the spread of export-oriented single-crop farming since the 1970s, swallowed enormous amounts of land, which is why Brazil has a large landless population, many of whom had no choice but to pour into the cities and squeeze into slums. You could call this a consequence of "dependent accumulation." At the same time Brazil's constitution, which descends from the Napoleonic Code, recognizes the social value of land and holds that land left unused or underused should be returned to society. So the movement organizes the landless to occupy and farm this idle land together, and on that basis to claim ownership of it. From its start in the 1970s through 2012, it had successfully settled a million people.

That image — a column of people with sickles raised, walking in silence into an abandoned estate — appears in Wim Wenders's documentary The Salt of the Earth. The film's subject, the photographer Sebastião Salgado, followed and photographed the Landless Workers' Movement through the 1980s and 1990s. Like every artist absorbed by "the toiling masses," he has said that in his youth he too was influenced by Marxist economics.

9. The Japan Communist Party and the "1968 Generation"

At the end of the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals of the Meiji era began bringing Marxist concepts and ideas into the country one after another; the first Marxist work translated into Japanese was an incomplete version of The Communist Manifesto in 1904. Those Japanese translations did a great deal to help Marxism spread in China not long after. Many Marxist terms in Chinese today come from the Japanese — "proletariat" and "ideology" among them.

But the Japan Communist Party was founded a year later than its Chinese counterpart. That year, with Soviet support, the JCP was set up as a branch of the Third International, calling for the abolition of the emperor system, civil rights, land reform and an eight-hour day, and opposing intervention abroad while demanding the withdrawal of troops stationed overseas. During the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, the JCP was the only party to oppose the war against China — though it did not oppose the experiment in anti-(Western)-colonial pioneer settlement in Manchuria, and took part in it itself.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, the American occupation authorities gave the Communist Party legal status. The JCP praised America's democratization policy highly and said it would advance a bourgeois-democratic revolution by democratic and peaceful means. At the same time it was busy organizing union movements and popular protests against food shortages, and, under the influence of the Soviet and Chinese parties, it produced a doctrine of "violent revolution only" in 1951 and began armed struggle. It had not counted on McCarthyism rising in the United States at the same moment, which brought a large-scale "Red Purge," driving its leaders underground or into exile in China. In 1958 the JCP announced it would "overcome ultra-left adventurism" and gave up violent revolution. This angered left-wing students, who parted ways with the "Old Left" the JCP stood for, formed the "New Left," and threw themselves recklessly into the new struggles of the 1960s.

In 1960, as Japan prepared to sign the US-Japan Security Treaty, the New Left began to show what it could do, mounting huge and ferocious demonstrations against tying a Japan that should have been walking toward permanent peace back onto America's war chariot. After the security treaty was forced through the Diet, the student movement broke into a great many factions.

In 1967 those factions launched a second wave of struggle against the security treaty. The images that define the period are students in multicolored helmets swinging wooden clubs at police, and a banner reading "It is right to rebel" hanging from the tower of the occupied Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo. The students of those years were indeed influenced by China's Cultural Revolution and by student movements in Europe and America, and were enraged by the Vietnam War. The alliance with the United States pushed students into a fierce rejection of their own country and even of their own nationality. But beyond that, the turning of diplomas into commodities and the rise in tuition at the time are also thought to be part of what set off the unrest.

After the police broke the blockade of the University of Tokyo in 1969, the student movement sank into a trough; some New Left factions turned to violent revolution, setting off bombs, hijacking planes, even killing one another (the Asama-Sanso incident). The extreme violence made society reject the New Left, and it fell silent.

John Dower, author of Embracing Defeat, argues that although the JCP took heavy blows in the 1950s, it planted Marxist and radical thought of every variety deep in people's minds and in everyday life — so much so that Japan's later economic policy leaned toward accepting state intervention, and corporate culture put more weight on cooperating with union leaders.

Today's JCP can still make a showing in parliamentary politics. The more disappointed people are with right-wing politics, the more willing they are to vote for it. In 2015 it became the largest opposition party in local elections, and its party newspaper, Akahata (Red Flag), reached a daily circulation of 1.2 million copies.

The New Left, or the "1968 Generation," having gone abruptly quiet after the shocking violence of the 1970s, shifted into all kinds of movements to build civil society out of "everyday life" — environmental movements, consumer cooperatives, popular art practices like film and theater. The political sociologist Takemasa Ando argues, in his 2013 book New Left Movements and Civil Society, that it was precisely because the "1968 Generation" chose to retreat into everyday life in pursuit of "self-revolution," giving up active engagement with politics and lawmaking, that it became a powerless generation. That is why, when the Fukushima nuclear crisis came, they opposed nuclear power and still could not change Japan's nuclear policy. But in the eyes of the "1968 Generation," in today's world the bigger politics is exactly there, in everyday life.

Whatever the case, on August 30, 2015, when Shinzo Abe tried to force through security legislation and lift the ban on the "right of collective self-defense" — much as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi had forced through the security treaty in 1960 — 100,000 protesters appeared in front of the Diet Building once again.

It came to be called Japan's "Third Anti-Security-Treaty Movement." The student group SEALDs did the key work of mobilizing it, and the older generation of the "New Left" gave them active support — even though the movement no longer had a distinctly left-wing color.

Cover image: a march in support of Allende in Chile, 1964, from pxhere; inside header image: a Japan Communist Party sound truck, from Wikipedia.