The darker nations, p.1
The Darker Nations, page 1
Vijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, and the chief correspondent for Globetrotter. He is the author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today and co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of The Withdrawal (both published by The New Press), as well as Washington Bullets. The Darker Nations was chosen as a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile.
ALSO BY VIJAY PRASHAD
Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism
The Karma of Brown Folk
Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare
The Darker Nations
A People’s History of the
Third World
A NEW PRESS PEOPLE’S HISTORY
VIJAY PRASHAD
Series Editor
Howard Zinn
NEW YORK
LONDON
CONTENTS
Series Preface by Howard Zinn
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
Introduction
Part 1: Quest
Paris
a concept conjured
Brussels
the 1928 League against Imperialism
Bandung
the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference
Cairo
the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference
Buenos Aires
imagining an economy
Tehran
cultivating an imagination
Belgrade
the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement Conference
Havana
the 1966 Tricontinental Conference
Part 2: Pitfalls
Algiers
the perils of an authoritarian state
La Paz
released from the barracks
Bali
death of the Communists
Tawang
war most foul
Caracas
oil, the devil’s excrement
Arusha
socialism in a hurry
Part 3: Assassinations
New Delhi
the obituary of the Third World
Kingston
IMF-led globalization
Singapore
the lure of the Asian Road
Mecca
when culture can be cruel
Conclusion
Notes
Index
SERIES PREFACE
Turning history on its head opens up whole new worlds of possibility. Once, historians looked only at society’s upper crust: the leaders and others who made the headlines and whose words and deeds survived as historical truth. In our lifetimes, this has begun to change. Shifting history’s lens from the upper rungs to the lower, we are learning more than ever about the masses of people who did the work that made society tick.
Not surprisingly, as the lens shifts the basic narratives change as well. The history of men and women of all classes, colors, and cultures reveals an astonishing degree of struggle and independent political action. Everyday people played complicated historical roles, and they developed highly sophisticated and often very different political ideas from the people who ruled them. Sometimes their accomplishments left tangible traces; other times, the traces are invisible but no less real. They left their mark on our institutions, our folkways and language, on our political habits and vocabulary. We are only now beginning to excavate this multifaceted history.
The New Press People’s History Series roams far and wide through human history, revisiting old stories in new ways, and introducing altogether new accounts of the struggles of common people to make their own history. Taking the lives and viewpoints of common people as its point of departure, the series reexamines subjects as different as the American Revolution, the history of sports, the history of American art, the Mexican Revolution, and the rise of the Third World.
A people’s history does more than add to the catalogue of what we already know. These books will shake up readers’ understanding of the past—just as common people throughout history have shaken up their always changeable worlds.
Howard Zinn
Boston, 2000
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 1981, during the summer, I wrote a short essay as a school project on the history of oil. My father introduced me to Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, and to the complex history of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including the role of the Venezuelan and Saudi Arabian oil ministers who feature in this book. When my father died in 1999, I had already begun to think of this book, and we had briefly discussed its contours. As with all my other books, this one too is written in conversation with his spirit.
Andy Hsiao at The New Press unearthed this book, and edited it with care, wisdom, and grace. Sudhanva Deshpande at Leftword Books is my political mooring.
Ten years ago, Naeem Inayatullah gave me a copy of Global Rift by L.S. Stavrianos. The book allowed me to visualize the history of the Third World, although Stavrianos had a much longer story to tell (from the start of colonialism to the 1980s). My ambit is much briefer, but it could not have been without Naeem’s gift.
Helpful librarians at Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts, the Hoover Institute, Singapore’s National Archives, and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) as well as the necessary labor of Professor Vatroslav Vekaric, editor of the Review of International Affairs, enabled me to assemble the materials necessary for this book. Friends here and there, including my sister Leela, provided me with the essential linguistic assistance (particularly to make my elementary European language skills come to life). Each snapshot, each section, is rooted in a city or a town. The book opens in Paris and ends in Mecca. I take advantage of this structure to tell the history of each city, of its country and its various movements. This kind of book relies greatly on secondary sources, and therefore on the hard and generous labors of generations of scholars. The length of the endnotes is an indication of how much I have borrowed from and owe them. For the lay reader, there might be too much detail; for the specialist, there will be too little. This is the risk of such a book.
Sarah Fan, Joel Ariaratnam, and Melissa Richards (all of The New Press), and Cindy Milstein, the copy editor, gave this book all the help it needed.
Several people took these ideas seriously before I knew they had any currency. The Labor/Community Strategy Center (notably, Eric Mann, Lian Hurst Mann, Tammy Bang Luu, and Manuel Criollo) not only invited me to Los Angeles to talk about these issues but also published my ideas in its Ahora Now. Greg Meyerson (of Cultural Logic) and I had a productive discussion during a trip to North Carolina A&T. Just Act (Rishi Awantramani, Josh Warren-White, and Steve Williams) provided a nice forum in San Francisco to debate the many left lines that cut through the darker nations. Betty Bayer afforded a more genteel podium at Hobart and William Smith College, where I got to deliver a Fisher Center Lecture and have valuable conversations on race and nationalism. Howard Winant’s intellectual hospitality at the University of California at Santa Barbara is unmatched. Shiva Balaghi, Lisa Duggan, Andrew Ross, and Walter Johnson as well as Vivek Bald buoyed me with ideas and inspiration. Indira Ravindran gave me a push. At Trinity, I’m blessed to have Michael Niemann, Barbara Sicherman, Susan Pennybacker, Joan Hedrick, Johnny Williams, and Raymond Baker, all of whom know the world with clarity and compassion. Former students Toufic Haddad and Sai Madivala, among others, taught me with their wisdom and political commitments. Bill Strickland dropped the essential plumb line. Teo Ballvé, Shonali Bose, Amitava Kumar, Sunaina Maira, Gautam Premnath, Kasturi Ray, P. Sainath, and Rinku Sen give me my bearings. Mir Ali Raza gave me this line from Faiz (Zindan Nama, 1956), which reminds us of the hope in the twin projects of the Third World and socialism: “One day, this field will ripen for the bountiful harvest/Till then, we must toil in the field without rest.”
In Delhi, I tried out these ideas thanks to Sudhanva Deshpande at the Oxford Book Store for a Leftword Books event. In Chennai, I tried out variations of the broad thesis at the Madras Bar Association (thanks to G. Chamki Raj and K. Subburam), All-India Women’s Association (thanks to my sister Rani), the Indian School of Social Science (thanks to R. Vijayshankar), and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (thanks to K. Nagaraj, Rukmani, and Venkatesh Atreya). Shorter pieces that drew from the book appeared thanks to my editors at Frontline (N. Ram and R. Vijayshakar), ZNET (Mike Albert), Counterpunch (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair), and Monthly Review (John Bellamy Foster). The earliest version of this book was War against the Planet: The Fifth Afghan War, Imperialism, and Other Assorted Fundamentalisms (New Delhi: Leftword, 2002). Tom Fenton invited me to participate in a roundtable on the work of Peter Gowan for Critical Asian Studies, where I worked out some additional directions. Rachael Gillett and Paul Teodoulou of Global Dialogue opened their pages to some of this book’s ideas. Salah D. Hassan (CR: The New Centennial Review) along with Naeem Inayatullah and Robin Riley (for their edited collection Interrogating Imperialism [Palgrave, 2006]) enabled Lisa Armstrong and myself to try out more elaborate versions of our analysis of women’s rights in a national liberation framework. All this and more helped me craft the thesis and story that is The Darker Nations.
I wrote most of the book in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is such a terr
My wise family gives me warmth and ideas. My mother and Rosy in Calcutta, sister in Madras, sister and brother in California, nieces and nephews in Arizona, California, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, the Bose-Pains in Los Angeles, the B207 nest made comfortable by the mashis, the new one in Chittaranjan Park, and the Armstrongs of California and Connecticut. The book would be nothing without the theoretical and political wisdom of Brinda Karat and Prakash Karat.
The Darker Nations is for Lisa, who gets it before I do. And for Zalia Maya and Rosa Maya, who know better.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Darker Nations, Possible Histories
Democracy is a method of doing the impossible.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of the War” (1915)
THE THIRD WORLD PROJECT
Darker Nations is a history of the Third World Project. It is this project’s development that I trace from the 1920s to the 1980s. A wide range of initiatives came together in a relatively coherent platform of demands that was pushed through by people’s struggles and at various United Nations and international forums. That project was assassinated in the 1980s by a combination of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist state system in eastern Europe, of the severe debt crisis provoked by global financial turbulence, and of the exhaustion of the platform of the Third World governments who surrendered to U.S.-driven globalization. The people who live in the societies that once adopted the Third World Project live on, of course; certainly, they are making history. But not on the same platform.
In the 1980s, the “third world” was seen in the international media and the academic literature as a term connoting failed states with a tincture of famine, poverty, and hopelessness. Long gone, it seemed, were the days of great hope that emerged as China, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and others walked onto the world stage in the 1940s and 1950s to demand the end of colonialism and the equality of nations. This great hope is often named the Bandung Spirit after the conference of twenty-nine nations held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. But there were reminders of that great hope, such as when Thomas Sankara took power in Upper Volta in 1983, changed its name to Burkina Faso (Land of Upright People), and set his country along the path to dignity and progress. But even that great hope was cut down when Sankara was assassinated in 1987. The assassination of Sankara echoed the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and an entire history of coups and destabilization that marked the attempt by the countries of the Third World to claim their right to history. I was a schoolboy when Sankara came to power and a college student when he was assassinated, his death a blow to our hopes that the Third World Project would be restarted.
A decade later, under very dif ferent conditions, Hugo Chávez carried this history forward with the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, which later faced the harshness of a hybrid war—from sanctions to sabotage—driven by the United States that continues to try and diminish the possibility for the creation of a genuine democratic world order. The conventional wisdom since the 1980s is that any attempt to create a dignified project in the zones of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is fated to failure, and therefore to charity. Such condescension erased the history of decolonization and of the imperialist assault on this history. I was eager, in Darker Nations, to produce a richer history than one of existential failure, to uncover the hopes of the Third World Project, to uncover the contradictory attempts to create a new world, and to uncover the harsh reality it faced from the imperialist bloc.
The anti-colonial struggles that produced the new nations schooled the vast mass of the population about the roots and resources of imperialism. The Third World Project, therefore, comes not so much from the intellectuals alone, for if it did it would not have had so much popular support. Rather, it came from the wisdom of these popular movements. The Third World, in my analysis, is not so much a commonality of condition as it is a unity of purpose by the governments that, at least in the two decades after the 1950s, enjoyed significant popular legitimacy. And, for a time, it posed a challenge to the post—World War II dispensation, particularly with its agenda for disarmament, for a more just economic order (through the use of commodity cartels, subsidies, and tariffs), and for a world without racism. What united the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America was not their geography (South), but their politics (nonalignment and the search for dignity). That is why Darker Nations opens with the sentences, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.” It was this project that was defined in the early years after World War II, and it was this project that was killed off because it was a threat to the imperialist world order.
The conditions for the project certainly do exist in our times. But the project of our times cannot simply lift the contours of the Third World Project of the past. We must build our own project—one that emerges from our current struggles against a constantly renewed but fatally flawed international capitalist system. More and more capital flees from productive investment into non-productive financial use, with trillions of dollars hoarded in illicit tax havens and trillions more buried in the quicksand of the financial deserts, the stock and currency markets. We need to account for the new conditions, for the new struggles against them, and for the possibility of an international platform capable of dealing with an aggressive U.S. military, the West’s new Cold War against China and Russia, and the “planet of slums” that sharpens as poverty and hunger rise in the context of austerity and privatization. This is precisely what I did in the follow-up work, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013) and it is the agenda of the research institute I direct, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
IMPERIALISM WILL INEVITABLY BE DEFEATED
When Fidel Castro, the prime minister of Cuba, took the stage on the last day of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (January 1966), he was thirty-nine years old. The Cuban Revolution, which he had led to victory in 1959, had just celebrated its seventh anniversary, meaning he was only thirty-two when the dictator Fulgencio Batista was run out of power. By 1966, Castro already had a gravity, the depth of his voice and the composure of his frame. Five years previously, the Cuban Revolution had defeated the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency at the beaches of Playa Giron, and by 1966 Castro had personally foiled several assassination attempts. “Imperialism will inevitably be defeated,” he told more than five hundred delegates from across the world. No one in the room doubted him.
Cuba is less than ninety miles from the shores of the United States. It had been the playground of U.S. elites since it was seized from Spain in 1898. Wretched was its situation for the six decades that it lay under the thumb of Wall Street financiers and Las Vegas gangsters. The Revolution of 1959 had been welcomed by most of the Cuban people. They were not going to allow their gains to be revoked by the overthrow of this revolutionary government. Whatever privations the United States would place upon Cuba, its people would be resolute. This was what gave Fidel the confidence that Cuba’s adversary—imperialism—would suffer a total defeat.
Why did the United States and its allies attempt to assassinate Castro, and why did they blockade Cuba? What did this relatively small and poor country do to deserve such treatment? The ugly history of colonialism, which structured the hierarchies for modern capitalism, had created zones of the world where, even after decolonization, the royalties to the poor countries from their raw materials (especially precious ones, such as petroleum and copper) were kept low and the wages to workers in these countries were suppressed. The argument made for the lowered wages was often racist: namely, people in these parts of the world have an apparently minimal cultural expectation for life so why should they garner more resources to improve their society? If ever a political force arose that wanted to renegotiate these royalties and to lift the wages and social conditions of their people, if any force arose—in other words—to exercise sovereignty over its territory, then it would face the wrath of the powers that defended the old colonial-ordered capitalist system. Habits of hybrid war—from economic sanctions to coups to invasions—kicked in, and these progressive political forces were either overthrown or forced to withdraw their claims. Cuba—like Haiti before it (1804)—did not surrender, which is why it became a reference for many people around the world who dreamt of something other than what was possible in the suffocating horizon of poverty.
