Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World | Hoover Institution

A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Jeremy Friedman.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Ripe for Revolution traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge ahead through trial and error. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeremy Friedman is the Marvin Bower associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution over the course of the twentieth century, as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization. He is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (2015), and has published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies, as well as The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times.

Episode Transcript

(00:07):
[MUSIC]Hello, I'm Niall Ferguson,
the Milbank family senior fellowhere at the Hoover Institution and
chair of the Hoover History Working Group.
And we've just had the pleasureof hearing from my old friend,
Professor Jeremy Friedman from HarvardBusiness School on the subject of his
latest book.
Jeremy is the Marvin Bauer Professor ofBusiness Administration at HBS, where he

(00:28):
teaches in the biggie unit, business andgovernment in the international economy.
But unusually fora Harvard Business School professor,
Jeremy's interested in socialism.
His first book, the Shadow Cold War,came out in 2015.
The second is ripe for revolution,building socialism in the third world.
And that's what he talks about today.

(00:49):
Jeremy, congratulations on the book.
I understand it's the secondpart of a projected trilogy.
How does a Professor at HBS come to writea trilogy on the history of socialism?
This must be a first.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (01:03):
Well, as I said,
I didn't start out atHarvard Business School.
But I think the big issue for me was justtrying to understand the trajectory of
the left in the course of the 20th and21st centuries.
So we think about the left today.
It's not the way we think aboutthe popular front of the 1930s and such.
It's not necessarily based onmobilizing the working classes
in exactly the same way.

(01:24):
And so I was interested in that right,
because the left is still an importantpolitical phenomenon, and
I wanted to understand how itcame to be what it is today.
And so I saw the 1960s asan important inflection point.
And so the trilogy is sort of built aroundthat transformation, one book each for
one of the three so called worlds of theCold War, the first, second, and third.

>> Niall Ferguson (01:45):
This volume is very much focused on what was cold in the 1960s
and 1970s, the third world,not by the Soviets, but
certainly in the United States.
And you've picked a groupof countries to focus on,
Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania,Angola, and Iran.

(02:05):
It's a tremendously rich book, and
I really encourage people to buy it andread it.
But let's just pick a coupleof those to zoom in on.
I'm going to pick the controversialones that have attracted
a lot of scholarship in the past.
Let's start with Chile.
What's going on there?

(02:25):
I think most people understandthat Allende comes to power.
He's a left wing president, andthe United States is not happy about that.
And there's a sense that the United Statesdoes at least some of the work
that leads to his being overthrown.
You tell the story froma very different perspective.

(02:46):
How is it different?

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (02:48):
So the existing story is, as you say,
is very much about external forces.
It's about the role of the United States,especially.
And I'm not saying the United Stateswas not an important factor.
It certainly was.
But I think what's been missed in this isthe domestic politics and how important
the divisions inside the Chilean regimewere, and for the following reason.
I mean, you look at this geography and
basically comes down toone of two versions.

(03:09):
Either Allende was just,
you know, a democratic socialist whowas targeted by the United States, or
he was a communist totalitarian benton turning Chile into a dictatorship.
And the truth is he was neither.
He was actually a democrat who wantedto build soviet style socialism,
which is a contradiction, it seems,because that hasn't happened.
But that's precisely the contradictionat the center of the regime.

(03:31):
There was always this tension abouthow do you maintain democracy, but
move towards actual socialist revolution?
The divisions over how to do that,I think,
are what primarilybrought down the regime.

>> Niall Ferguson (03:42):
One of the things you pointed out in our seminar was how keenly
involved the Soviets werein the Allende regime.
Talk a bit about what youfound in the Soviet archives.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (03:52):
In which regime?

>> Niall Ferguson (03:53):
In the Allende regime in Chile.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (03:55):
Well, yes, I mean, I found that every single year in
the Soviet archives, there's a thousandpage file of the ambassador's
conversations with Chilean politicalfigures, leaders of the Communist party,
the Socialist Party,the radicals, Mapu, others.
Allende, he's meeting withthem every single week, and

(04:16):
they're discussing day to day strategyof what the regime is going to do next.
Which bill should they introduce?
How should they fight this election?
What should they do about a peasantseizure of land in the south and such, or
a factory strike?
Allende resigns multiple times, and theSoviets have to talk the Communists and
Socialist leaders into bringing Allendeback because he's willing to quit

(04:40):
over the divisions withinhis own coalition.
And so the Soviets are basicallysort of managing the day to day
operations of individual politicalparties, coaching them step by step.

>> Niall Ferguson (04:50):
So it wasn't entirely wrong for people in Washington to
think that this was a Moscowbacked regime trying to take Chile
into a soviet style system ofstate control of the economy.
This wasn't some fantasy.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (05:06):
Well, I think it would have
looked that way from the outside.
I don't think the Soviets themselvesthought they were in control of
the situation.
I don't think they intended tobe in control of the situation.
I think they were justa heavily involved coach.
But in a certain sense, just like anyother coach, they're not on the field.
The players controlthe outcome of the game, but
the Soviets were sort ofcalling a lot of the plays.

>> Niall Ferguson (05:28):
Now, part of what you're describing here is the aftermath of
decolonization.
It's the collapse of what had beenEuropean colonial regimes that
creates the opportunities either forcivil war or for
the creation of somekind of socialist regime.
This is especially clear in the case ofAngola, which goes from being a Portuguese
colony to being a major battleground ofthe cold war in the course of the 1970s.

(05:53):
What's your take on developments there?
The Cubans play a role inaddition to the Soviets, but
help us understand better what'sgoing on in Angola in the seventies.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (06:06):
What's happening in Angola in the 707,
first of all, Angola has a tripartitedivision of the liberation movements.
The FNLA backed by the US initially,later on by the French, Zaire, Chinese,
Unida, backed to a certain degree by theChinese, and later on by South Africans.
There's a competition who's going tobe the liberation movement that sort of

(06:27):
rules Angola.
And the MPLA is the one backed bythe Soviets, the Cubans and others.
And they end up winning in part becausethey hold on to the capital and access
to the oil reserves and therefore are ableto fund the war in a certain sense.
But what happens in the course ofthat is that with the Soviets,
the Cubans, the East Germans and others,

(06:48):
they kind of build a Leninist politicalsystem, which you have a party state
where the party has the nomenclaturethat controls the institutions.
They have a secret police.
They built a very strong military, andthey fund all this from selling oil
abroad, which is beingextracted by Gulf Oil,
which is an american company, in partalong with other western companies.

(07:08):
You have a Leninist political systembent on constructing socialism that is
being funded by essentiallywestern businesses.
And so you have this marriage ofa socialist political elite in control of
a capitalist economystill tied to the west.
That not only survivesthe post colonial war,
it survives the post cold war civil war.

(07:30):
And the MPLA remains in power today andstill in charge of the oil revenue,
essentially.

>> Niall Ferguson (07:35):
But in the end,
are you left with something thatis still recognizably socialist?
You showed a map of southern Africa and
said this kind of quasi Leninistmodel persists to an amazing extent.
I get your central message, which is thatthey kind of abandon Stalinists approaches
to the economy, but they retainedLeninist approaches to politics.

(07:58):
There's one party andit's in charge all the time, but
is there really anything leftof socialism by the end?

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (08:04):
Well, the MPLA itself disavows socialism,
they no longer claim to be socialist.
But the regime that remains is a regimethat was constructed in the name
of socialism.
So in a certain sense, and
nobody would say that Angolatoday is a model of socialism.
They don't claim to be socialist, but thecountry as it's currently constructed is
a product of the attemptto build socialism.

(08:24):
In a sense, the infrastructure isstill there and was never removed.

>> Niall Ferguson (08:28):
Well, at a time when many young Americans seem quite confused
about what socialism is,it's incredibly enriching to have a new
history of socialism that looks atwhat it was and how it evolved.
And I look forward very much to the thirdpart of this extraordinary trilogy.
The book once again is Ripe forRevolution,

(08:50):
Building Socialism in the Third World.
The author is Jeremy Friedman, andwatch this space for volume three.
Thanks very much, Jeremy.

>> Professor Jeremy Friedman (08:58):
Thank you. [MUSIC]