Using Das Kapital as a Pillow
February 19, 2021
Many Marxists in colonized zones had never read Marx, writes Vijay Prashad
in this sampling of influential leftists, many from peasant societies, who
built theories appropriate to their own context.
Book Street in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2016. (Hieucd, CC BY-SA 4.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
In 1911, a young Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) arrived in France, which had
colonized his homeland of Vietnam. Though he had been raised with a
patriotic spirit committed to anti-colonialism, Ho Chi Minhs temperament
did not allow him to retreat into a backward-looking romanticism.
He understood that the people of Vietnam needed to draw from their own
history and traditions as well as from the democratic currents set loose by
the revolutionary movements around the world.
In France, he became involved in the socialist movement, which taught him
about working-class struggles in Europe, although the French socialists
could not bring themselves to break with the colonial policies of their
country. This frustrated Ho Chi Minh. When the socialist Jean Longuet told
him to read Karl Marxs Capital, Ho Chi Minh found it hard going and later
said that he mainly used it as a pillow.
The October Revolution of 1917 that inaugurated the Soviet Republic lifted
Ho Chi Minhs spirit. Not only did the working class and the peasantry take
over the state and try to refashion it, but the leadership of the new state
offered a strong defense of anti-colonial movements.
With great pleasure, Ho Chi Minh read V. I. Lenins Theses on the National
and Colonial Question, which Lenin had written for the 1920 Communist
International meeting. This young Vietnamese radical, whose country had been
held in bondage from 1887, found in this text and others the theoretical and
practical basis to build his own movement.
Ho Chi Minh went to Moscow, then to China, and eventually returned home to
Vietnam to lead his country out of colonial oppression and out of a war
imposed on Vietnam by France and the United States (a war that ended with
Vietnams victory six years after Ho Chi Minhs death).
Ho Chí Minh in 1921. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Wikimedia Commons)
In 1929, Ho Chi Minh said that the class struggle does not manifest itself
the way it does in the West. He did not mean that the gap between the West
and the East was cultural; he meant that the struggles in places such as the
former Russian Empire and Indo-China had to take into consideration a number
of factors unique to these parts of the world: the structure of colonial
domination, the deliberately underdeveloped productive forces, the abundance
of peasants and landless agricultural workers and the inherited and
reproduced wretched hierarchies of the feudal past (such as caste and
patriarchy).
Creativity was necessary, which is what made the Marxists in the colonized
zones build their theory of struggle out of a concrete engagement with their
own complex realities. The texts written by people such as Ho Chi Minh
appeared as if they were merely commentaries on the current situation, when
in fact these Marxists were building their theories of struggle out of
specific contexts that were not immediately apparent to Marx and his main
successors within Europe (such as Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein).
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 37, Dawn: Marxism
and National Liberation, explores this creative interpretation of Marxism
across the Global South, from Perus José Carlos Mariátegui to Lebanons
Mahdi Amel. The dossier is an invitation to a dialogue, a conversation about
the entangled tradition of Marxism and national liberation, a tradition that
emerges out of the October Revolution of 1917 and that deepens its roots in
the anti-colonial conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
José Carlos Mariátegui in 1929. (José Malanca, Wikimedia Commons)
When the categories of Marxism drifted outside the boundaries of the North
Atlantic region, they had to be slightly stretched, as Frantz Fanon wrote
in Wretched of the Earth (1963), and the narrative of historical materialism
had to be enhanced.
These categories surely had a universal application but could not be applied
in the same way everywhere. Each of the movements that took up Marxism
such as the movement to liberate Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh had to first
translate it into their own context. The central problem of Marxism in the
colonies was that the productive forces in these parts of the world had been
systematically eroded by imperialism and the older social hierarchies had
not been washed away by the currents of democracy. How does one make a
revolution in a place without social wealth?
Lenins lessons resonated with people like Ho Chi Minh because Lenin argued
that imperialism would not allow the development of the productive forces in
places such as India and Egypt. These were regions whose role in the global
system was to produce raw materials and buy the finished products of
Europes factories. No liberal elite emerged in these regions of the world
that was truly committed to anti-colonialism or to human emancipation.
Creating Basis for Social Equality
In the colonies, it was the left that had to drive the struggle against
colonialism and for the social revolution. This meant that it had to create
the basis for social equality, including the advancement of the productive
forces.
It was the left that had to use the scarce resources that remained after
colonial pillage, amplified by the enthusiasm and commitment of the people,
to socialize production through the use of machines and better organization
of labor and to socialize wealth to advance the development of education,
health, nutrition, and culture.
Each of the socialist revolutions after October 1917 took place in the
impoverished zones of colonialism, such as Mongolia (1921), Vietnam (1945),
China (1949), Cuba (1959), Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde (1975), and Burkina
Faso (1983). These were mainly peasant societies, their capital stolen by
their colonial rulers and their productive forces developed only so as to
allow for the export of raw materials and the import of finished products.
Each revolution was met with immense violence from their departing colonial
rulers, who focused on destroying the remaining wealth of the society.
The war against Vietnam is emblematic of this violence. One campaign,
Operation Hades, provides a sufficient illustration. From 1961 to 1971, the
United States government sprayed 73 million litres of chemical weapons to
destroy any vegetation in Vietnam. Agent Orange, the most terrible of
chemical weapons in its day, was used on most of Vietnams agricultural
belt.
U.S. Air Force spraying defoliant next to a road in South Vietnam in 1962.
(U.S. Air Force, Wikimedia Commons)
This warfare not only killed the millions who died in the war, but it left
socialist Vietnam with a terrible legacy: tens of thousands of Vietnamese
children were born with grave challenges (spina bifida, cerebral palsy) and
millions of acres of good farmland were made toxic by these weapons. Both
the medical and agricultural devastation have lasted for at least five
generations, with every indication that they will persist for several
generations more.
Vietnams socialists had to build their country not out of a textbook model
of socialism but by confronting the maladies inflicted upon their country by
imperialism. Their socialist path had to run through the terrible reality
that was specific to their own history and reality.
Our dossier makes the point that many Marxists in the colonial world had
never read Marx. They had read about Marxism in various cheap pamphlets and
had encountered Lenin in this form as well: books were too expensive, and
they were often difficult to get. People like Cubas Carlos Baliño
(1848-1926) and South Africas Josie Palmer (1903-1979) came from humble
backgrounds with little access to the intellectual traditions out of which
Marxs critique emerged. But they knew its essence through their struggles,
and through their reading and their own experiences, they built theories
that were appropriate for their context.
Today, committed study continues to be a pillar for our movements and for
our hopes of building a better future. For this reason, each year, on Feb.
21 February, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research participates in
Red Books Day.
Last year, over 60,000 people went into public places to read the Communist
Manifesto on the 172nd anniversary of its publication on Feb. 21, 1848.
This year, due to the pandemic, the events will mostly take place online. We
encourage you to seek out publishers and organizations in your area that
might be holding a Red Books Day event and get involved. If there are no
events near you, please hold your own event or take to social media to talk
about your favorite red books and what they mean to your struggles. We hope
that Red Books Day will become as central to our calendar as May Day.
Ho Chi Minh whose name means Well of Light was almost always seen with
his pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a book near at hand. He loved to
read and he loved conversation, both of which helped develop his
understanding of the world in motion. What red book rests beside you as you
read this newsletter? Will you join us on Red Books Day and add our new
dossier to your red book reading list?
Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian, journalist and commentator, is the
executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the
chief editor of Left Word Books.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.