Reinventing the Left in the Global South

Twentieth-century socialism stands as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls into which socialist movements can fall. In the Global South, the wave of socialist regimes of the 1960s and 1970s soon subsided. Many of them descended into civil war or chaos in the 1980s and 1990s. With rare exceptions, socialist experiments devolved into an authoritarian and statist route that subordinated society and economy to centralized edicts. This degenerative form of socialism has aptly been termed bureaucratic collectivism.

From today’s perspective, this outcome is not surprising. Socialism, we realize, involves an inherently complex and conflictual reorganization of economy and society. This transformative approach might be expected to work best in countries with well-developed class identities, traditions of autonomous political and social organization on a non-parochial basis, a civic culture, an economy productive enough to lift the population out of poverty, and a state with high administrative and fiscal capacity. Yet, as sketched in Chapter 4, most countries in the Global South, especially those with low-income or “fragile” states, lack all or some of these characteristics.

Nevertheless, an early strand of socialist thinking, which traces its origins to the utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century, held that even economically backward societies could achieve socialism. The Narodniks of Russia in the late nineteenth century were an exemplar of this view. These leftist intellectuals believed that largely agrarian Russia could skip the capitalist stage and directly enter socialism. In effect, the country could move from “primitive communism” to modern socialism, if the peasantry could be aroused to overthrow the tsarist order. The village commune was seen as the embryo of the new society. Local peasant solidarity and the communal land tenure system would be extended to the society as a whole to form a collective system of production and exchange.