Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World

foreign hello I'm Neil Ferguson the Milbank family senior fellow here at the Hoover institution and chair of the Hoover history working group and we've just had the pleasure of hearing uh from my old friend Professor Jeremy Friedman from Harvard Business School on the subject of his latest book Jeremy is the Marvin Bower professor of business administration at HBS where he teaches in the biggie unit business and government in the international economy but unusually for a 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 Jeremy congratulations on the book I understand it's the second part of a projected Trilogy uh how does a professor at HBS come to write a Trilogy on the history of socialism this must be a first well as I said I I don't didn't start out at Harvard Business School but I think the big issue for me was just trying to understand the trajectory of the left in the course the 20th and 21st centuries so we think about the left today it's not the way we think about you know the popular front of the 1930s and such um it's honestly based on mobilizing the working classes in exactly the same way and so I was interested in that right because the left is still you know an important political phenomenon and I wanted to understand you know how it came to be what it is today and so I saw the 1960s as an important inflection point um and so the the trilogy is sort of built around that transformation one book each for one of the three so-called worlds of the Cold War the first second and third and this volume is very much focused on what was cold in the 1960s and 1970s the third world not by the Soviets but uh certainly in the United States and you've picked up a group of countries to focus on Indonesia Chile Tanzania Angola Iran it's a tremendously Rich book and I I really encourage people to buy it and read it but but let's just pick a couple of those uh to zoom in on and I'm going to pick the controversial ones that have attracted a lot of scholarship in the past let's start with Chile what's what's going on there I think most people understand uh that Allende comes to par he's a left-wing president and the United States is not happy about that and there's a sense that the United States does at least some of the work that leads to his being overthrown you tell the story from a very different perspective how is it different right so the 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 States was not an important factor it certainly was but I think what's been missed in this is the domestic politics and how important the divisions inside the children Lane regime were and for the following reason I mean you look at the stereography and basically comes down to one of two versions either IND was just you know a Democratic Socialist who was targeted by the United States or he was a communist totalitarian bent on turning Chile into dictatorship and the truth is he was neither he was actually a Democrat who wanted to build soviet-style socialism which is a contradiction it seems because that hasn't happened but that's precisely the contradiction at the center of the regime and so there was always this tension about how do you maintain democracy but move towards actual socialist Revolution and the divisions over how to do that I think are what primarily brought down the regime one of the things you pointed at in our seminar was how keenly involved the Soviets were in the India regime talk a bit about what you found in the Soviet archives in which regime in the in the Allende regime in Chile well yes I mean I found that you know there's every single year in the Soviet archives there's a thousand page file of the ambassador's conversations with Chilean political figures leaders of the Communist Party the Socialist Party the radicals mapu others Allende he's meeting with them every single week and they're discussing day-to-day strategy of you know what the what the regime is going to do next which bill should they introduce um you know how should they you know fight this election what should they do about you know peasant seizure of land in the South and such or a factory strike ayendi resigned multiple times and the Soviets have to talk the Communists and socialist leaders into bringing Allende back because he's willing to quit over the division it within his own Coalition and so the Soviets are basically sort of managing the day-to-day operations of you know individual political parties you know coaching them step by step so it wasn't entirely wrong for people in Washington to think that this was a moscow-backed regime trying to take Chile into a soviet-style system of State control of the economy this wasn't some fantasy well I think it would have looked that way from the outside I don't think the Soviets themselves thought they were in control of the situation I don't think they intended to be in control of the situation I think they were just you know a heavily involved coach but in a certain sense just like any other coach they're not on the field they weren't the players control the outcome of the game but the Soviets were sort of calling a lot of the plays now part of what you're describing here is the aftermath of of decolonization it's the collapse of what had been European Colonial regimes that creates the opportunities either for Civil War for the creation of some kind of of socialist regime this is especially clear in the case of Angola which goes from being a Portuguese colony to being a major battleground of the Cold War in the course of the 1970s what's your take on developments uh there the Cubans play a role in addition to the Soviets but but help us understand better what's going on in Angola in the 70s well what's happening to go in the 70s first of all Angola has a tripartite division of the The Liberation movements um the fnla backed by you know the the US initially uh later on by the French Zaire Chinese United back to a certain degree by you know the Chinese and later on by South Africans um so there's there's a competition who's going to be the Liberation room that sort of rules Angola and the mpla is the one backed by the Soviets the Cubans and others and they end up winning in part because they hold on to the capital and access to to the oil reserves and therefore you know are able to fund the war in a certain sense um but what happens the course of that is that with the Soviets the Cubans these Germans and others they kind of build a leninist political system which you have you know a you know a party state where the party has the nomenclature that controls institutions they have a secret police they built a very strong military and they fund all this from selling oil abroad which is being extracted by Gulf oil which is an American company in part along with other Western companies and so you have a lead in this political system bent on constructing socialism that is being funded by you know essentially Western businesses and so you have this marriage of a socialist political Elite in control of a capitalist economy still tied to the west and that you know not only survives the you know post-colonial War it survives the post-cold war Civil War and the mpla remains in power today and still you know in charge of the oil Revenue essentially but in the end are you left with something that is still recognizably socialist you showed a map of of southern Africa and said this kind of quasi-leninist model persists to an amazing extent I get your your central message which is that they kind of abandoned stalinists approaches to the economy but they retained leninist approaches to politics there's one party and it's in charge all the time but is is there really anything left of socialism by the end well the mpla itself disavows socialism so they no longer claim to be socialists um but the regime that remains right is a regime that was constructed in the name of socialism so in a certain sense right and nobody would say that Angola today is a model of socialism they don't claim to be socialist but the country as it's currently constructed is a product of the attempt to build socialism in a sense right the the infrastructure is still there and was never removed well at the time when many Young Americans seem quite confused about what socialism is uh it's incredibly enriching to have a new history of socialism that looks at what it was and how it evolved uh and I look forward very much to the third part of this extraordinary uh Trilogy the book once again is right for revolution building socialism the third world the author is Jeremy Friedman and uh well watch this space for volume three thanks very much Jeremy thank you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 3,694

Keywords: World War II, Ripe for Revolution, Socialism, Socialism in the Third World, Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese

Id: Bx99217X5p0

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023