What frameworks help us name what we are seeing? What concepts and analyses illuminate the structure beneath the surface?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
When socialism met national liberation in the Global South, it had to rethink itself. Marxism had been written for industrial Europe; here it faced peasant majorities, colonial and neocolonial domination, and questions of culture, race, and nation that the classics barely addressed. This lens gathers the frameworks that resulted: Che’s theory of guerrilla struggle, the African socialisms of Nkrumah, Cabral, and Nyerere, and the “twenty-first-century socialism” of the pink tide and the argument it provoked. It builds directly on the analysis of imperialism and dependency in Imperialism and the Global System, and it carries the planning and transition debates of Revolution in Power into the periphery.
Anchor questions
- Can a small armed nucleus make a revolution, or must the conditions be there first? What did foco theory get right and wrong?
- What is “African socialism,” and is it a distinct thing or a name for many different projects?
- Cabral said the liberation movement must “return to the source” of popular culture. What does that mean in practice?
- Is “twenty-first-century socialism” a real alternative, or reformism with a red flag? Who is right, Dieterich or his critics?
- Does public or state ownership get you socialism? What did these theorists say it also requires?
Materials
All free unless marked otherwise. Each source’s standpoint is named.
Guerrilla strategy and the internationalist horizon
- Che Guevara (1928 to 1967), Guerrilla Warfare: A Method (1963). The concentrated statement of foco theory, the strategy that shaped a generation of insurgencies for better and worse. Free: marxists.org
- Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (1967). The call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” the internationalist horizon of the moment. Free: marxists.org
African socialism
- Kwame Nkrumah (1909 to 1972), Consciencism (1964). An African materialist philosophy folding communalism into a socialist synthesis. The most systematic statement of African socialism as theory. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism (1965). Independence without economic sovereignty as a new form of control, the book that named neocolonialism. Free: marxists.org
- Amilcar Cabral (1924 to 1973), Return to the Source (1973). On culture, class, and the militant’s return to popular life. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory (1966). Class and the productive forces rethought from the standpoint of the colonized. A cornerstone of Global South Marxism. Free: marxists.org
- Walter Rodney (1942 to 1980), Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism (1972). A sympathetic Marxist reading of Nyerere’s Ujamaa as genuine scientific socialism. Free: marxists.org
Twenty-first-century socialism and its critics
- Alvaro Garcia Linera (b. 1962), The Revolutionary State (2013). Bolivia’s Marxist vice-president on plurinationalism and why state property alone is not socialism. Free: criticallegalthinking.com
- Heinz Dieterich (b. 1943), The Socialism of the 21st Century (2007). The thesis that gave the pink tide its slogan, in its own voice. Free: transversal.at
- Alan Woods (b. 1944), Reformism or Revolution (2008). The Trotskyist rebuttal: Dieterich’s model leaves capitalism and the bourgeois state intact. The critic. Free: marxist.com
- Marta Harnecker (1937 to 2019), Ideas for the Struggle (2010). A reconstruction of movement-based democratic socialism for the Latin American left. A sympathetic architect of the pink tide. Free PDF: socialist-alliance.org
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on Sandinista and Sankarist thought as theory, and on indigenous and communitarian socialisms in their own terms.