There has recently been a resurgence in debates around the development of the capitalist world economy and the potentially progressive aspects of new international trends such as the expansion of BRICS, shifting alliances in West Asia, and so on. The “churning of the global order”, as Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research describes it, is viewed optimistically by those who see hope in “the Global South’s growing political demand for sovereignty and economic development”, while others outright dismiss the idea that capitalist states can play any kind of progressive role on the world stage.

The following article seeks to contribute to these discussions by summarizing the findings of leading socialist scholars who were working on similar questions in the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic (DDR). At that time, entire academic faculties were dedicated to developing Marxist analyses of the economic, political, legal, and cultural developments in the former colonies. Through international conferences and journals such as Problems of Peace and Socialism, the socialist states facilitated lively discussions amongst workers’ parties and popular movements from the Global South. Many of the insights gained during this historical period can help orient our debates today.

It is necessary to emphasise from the outset that this article in not meant to offer an analysis of the contemporary world order; the conclusions reached by these scholars pertained to their time (from the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s). We are also not claiming here that their analyses were correct.

The purpose of the article is rather to make socialist scholarship from the “Eastern bloc” accessible to an international audience. For several reasons (e.g., language barriers, but also political prejudices against scholars from “the East”), most of these works have been forgotten or ignored during the past 30 years. We believe, however, that there is much to learn from the dialectical materialist methodology employed by these analysts. The concrete international situation has undoubtedly changed since the 1980s, yet the theoretical framework developed in socialist scholarship can help to orient new analyses today.

What was this theoretical framework built upon? Its starting point was the political economy of the former colonies: how were the concrete socio-economic conditions shaping each of the nationally liberated states and what general developmental tendencies could be identified amongst different countries? There was a great appreciation of the unique and deeply contradictory situation of these states: colonialism and imperialist dependencies had deformed their societies by imposing capitalist modes of production on some branches of the economy while preserving feudal or even pre-feudal relations in other sectors. Following political independence, these societies entered a profound process of transition from colonial partition and subjugation towards a new social formation. The question was: on the basis of which relations of production and under the leadership of which classes was this process evolving? How was the development of the productive forces and the process of class differentiation shaping different variants of state power? To what extent were objective anti-imperialist tendencies bound up in this process and what role did subjectivity play in anti-imperialism? Class struggle was the lens through which these scholars analyzed global developments. They rejected black-and-white models (“either capitalist or socialist”) and instead sought to identify the direction and trajectory of different states.

When categorizing the former colonies, the challenge was to identify common developmental dynamics amongst a group of states that exhibited drastically different starting conditions. There was never unanimous agreement in socialist scholarship, but here we try to summarize the conclusions that were most influential.

A brief note on the scholars themselves is also in order, for their backgrounds reflect the qualitative shift in the character of academia in the socialist states: Sergei Tyulpanov, whose work is cited extensively below, served in the Red Army during both the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. In the late 1940s, he played a central role in the Soviet Military Administration in East Germany before leaving the Army to become a professor of economics at the Leningrad State University. Herbert Graf was one of many working-class children in East Germany to be offered the chance to study at a workers’ and peasants’ college. After graduation, he worked as a staffer to Walter Ulbricht for over a decade before becoming chair of the DDR’s professorship for “Constitutional Law of the Young National States” in 1971. In this role, he travelled throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America to advise socialist-oriented governments on constitutional law. Parviz Khalatbari, born in Tehran in 1925, fled from political persecution in the Shah’s Iran and settled in the DDR in 1956, where he studied at the Humboldt University and became one of the DDR’s leading scholars on economic underdevelopment in the former colonies. These were – as Gramsci famously described it in his Prison Notebooks – the “new intellectuals” of socialist society.

We encourage critical engagement with this article and welcome all responses or questions via kontakt@ifddr.org.

II. Contextualizing the liberated states in the revolutionary world process

The “Third World”, the “Global South”, and the “developing states” are terms that emerged throughout the latter half of the 20^th century to identify the former colonies and dependent states across Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the ‘tricontinent’1). Socialist scholars were wary of such terms for good reasons2, but would often accept them due to their dominance in international academic and diplomatic exchanges. Most often, the term “liberated states” was used to describe the former colonies, semi-colonies, and dependent states, although it was also acknowledged that the liberation of these states was incomplete so long as neocolonialism continued to deprive them of economic autonomy.

To begin analyzing the liberated states, socialist scholars sought to contextualize their position in the broad historical trajectory. The 20^th century began with capitalism growing into “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.”3 At its height, this imperialist colonial system stretched over more than 72 percent of the globe and exploited some 70 percent of the world population. The world economy was characterized by massive accumulation in the capitalist “metropolises” and the deepening of dependency in the “peripheries”. The 1917 October Revolution then inaugurated the “epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism on a global scale”. While there was an ebb in the revolutionary tide in Europe after the early 1920s, this did not last long: the defeat of German and Japanese fascism in 1945 opened the path to revolution in China and Vietnam and anti-fascist liberation throughout Eastern Europe. A socialist world system emerged to counter the (now US-led) imperialist order. The weakening of the “old” European imperialist powers after the Second World War and the upsurge in national liberation movements also brought about the collapse of the imperialist system of direct colonial rule. As the 1960 “Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties” in Moscow described it:

“Our epoch, whose main content is the transition from capitalism to socialism as initiated by the 1917 October Revolution, is the epoch of the struggle of the two opposing social systems, the epoch of the socialist revolution and the national liberation revolutions, the epoch of the collapse of imperialism and the liquidation of the colonial system, the epoch of the transition of more and more peoples to the path of socialism, the epoch of the triumph of socialism and communism on a world scale.”4“Moscow Declaration” (1960).

There were thus three interdependent currents driving the “revolutionary world process” in this epoch: the socialist states, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movements in the industrialized capitalist states. It was on this premise that socialist scholars began studying these three currents and the interrelation between them.

In 1969, Soviet economist Sergei Tyulpanov published a book entitled Political Economy and its Application in the Developing States in which he argued that the complex economic processes unfolding across the tricontinent could not be adequately understood by the laws formulated in the “classical” political economy of capitalism. For one, while many liberated states had begun to promote the capitalist mode of production as the basis for their national development, their starting conditions differed greatly from the origins of capitalism in Western Europe and North America (e.g., they had been deformed by colonialism and had no colonies of their own through which they could stimulate primitive accumulation).5 Additionally, the world economy was no longer characterized by one comprehensive (capitalist) world system, but by two competing and contradictory world systems.6 This had significant implications for the laws governing national economies throughout the tricontinent and the wider world economy: “The mode of production and the laws of capitalism are no longer universally binding and omnipotent, yet the mode of production and the laws of socialism are not yet operating everywhere.”

As such, Marxist political economy was tasked with uncovering the laws that governed this new subject: the nationally liberated state, which had become a central actor in the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism. Tyulpanov identified three principal criteria common to the “developing countries”7:

Their distinct position in the world economy and in world politics: “The majority of the formerly colonial and dependent countries remain integrated into the capitalist world system, although they do not belong to the system of imperialist states.”8 While political independence had ended direct foreign rule and brought greater scope for action, the position of the liberated states in the international capitalist division of labour had not changed. The laws governing the capitalist world system tended to deepen their economic dependence on the imperialist metropolises (explored more below). The consolidation of the socialist world system, however, opened the possibility for the liberated states to progressively connect to the international socialist division of labour and thus gradually decouple from the capitalist world economy. As such, while the “first stage of national liberation” was political in nature (the fight for national sovereignty), the “second stage of national liberation” had a deeply social character (a struggle over the path of the country’s future: capitalist or non-capitalist development). (For more on the two stages of national liberation, see here.)

The specific characteristics of their reproduction process: The colonial maldevelopment of these societies had given rise to multi-sectoral economies: the country’s economic sectors and branches were not “organically” linked to one another in a comprehensive national economy. Different modes of production governed different economic sectors. For instance, agriculture was often dominated by pre-capitalist (feudal, semi-feudal or primitive) modes of production, while craftwork was often regulated by relations of simple commodity production, and industry belonged to either a private capitalist sector (owned by national or foreign capital) or a state sector. At the same time, companies owned by foreign capital (particularly in natural resource extraction) were integrated into the reproduction process of the imperialist states, not of the liberated states themselves: “With a few exceptions, it is typical of all Afro-Asian developing countries that their economies are highly subject to the reproductive requirements of imperialist national and transnational corporations and the mechanisms of international banking capital.”9 The developing countries consequently conduct the vast majority of their foreign trade not with their geographical neighbours, but with the industrialized capitalist states. The economic base of these societies can thus be understood as a “contradictory socio-economic conglomerate” that is subject to neocolonial relations of dependency.10Tyulpanov, pg. 27.

Their social structure: The previous two factors are reflected in the social structure of the newly liberated states. While the exact social constellation often varies greatly, the main classes of the capitalist mode of production (bourgeoisie and proletariat) are generally still in the process of formation. As such, intermediary classes (intelligentsia, administrators/bureaucrats, military officers, etc.) and pre-capitalist social strata (semi-feudal landlords, tribal aristocracy, clerics, etc.)11 still exercise significant influence over society. The peasantry frequently makes up the vast majority of the population.

As these criteria suggest, the liberated states had to be understood dialectically; they were in a profound and contradictory “process of transition” from pre-capitalist relations to another social formation. The question was: on the basis of which relations of production and under the leadership of which classes was this process unfolding in each state? In examining this crossroad at which the liberated states stood, Tyulpanov identified three concurrent but competing tendencies that determined the forms and paths of economic development in these states:12Tyulpanov, pg. 30.

Which of these three tendencies will prevail in each state “depends on a complex combination of objective and subjective factors” during the second stage of national liberation. While the first two tendencies stimulate capitalist development, only the third tendency – if it can gain the upper hand over the other two – advances through a strategy of non-capitalist development to lay the socio-economic, political, and cultural foundations for the construction of socialism. The latter is what came to be referred to as “socialist orientation” in socialist scholarship and is explored in detail further below.

With this basic understanding of the transitional nature of the developing countries and their position in the revolutionary world process, socialist scholars set out to analyze the liberated states in the second half of the 20^th century according to their class character and socio-economic starting conditions. The principal categorization was between capitalist oriented and socialist orientated development.

III. The liberated states pursuing capitalist development

The predominant tendency in the economic development of the “young national states”13 was the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist mode of production. By the late 1980s, there were approximately 80 states throughout Asia and Africa following this capitalist path.14 As Tyulpanov observed, the conditions in the tricontinent were far more fertile for the development of capitalism than for the construction of socialism. On the one hand, the colonial powers had already imposed the capitalist mode of production on certain industries during the preceding era (e.g., extraction and processing) and, on the other hand, capitalist relations were spontaneously developing as commodity production progressively overturned feudal and pre-feudal forms of production in craftwork and agriculture.

It is first necessary to identify the common characteristics of this group (the economic base, the class relations, and the character of the state) before exploring their differences and categorizing them into subgroups.

A. The economic base: Dependent multi-sector economies

“The capitalism in those Afro-Asian countries pursuing capitalist development is not a capitalism that grew organically out of the historical process of the respective societies. Unlike in Europe or Japan, it was implanted as colonial capitalism in the course of the subjugation and exploitation of those countries. The colonies and semi-colonial states were integrated into the capitalist world economy as dependent and exploited components.”15

The national economies of the countries pursuing capitalist development operate as peripheral and dependent components of the capitalist world economy. Since significant branches (e.g., the extractive and processing industries) are owned and controlled by foreign capital, these economies lack a ‘closed’ reproduction process. A significant portion of their surplus product and natural resources are funneled off to the imperialist metropolises, which is often the same country that colonized them in the previous era. It is common, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, that just one or two raw materials dominate the exports of a single country. At the same time, pre-capitalist modes of production remain intact in other sectors of the economy and remain influential in the base and superstructure.

To describe the special position that these states now hold in the world economy, Tyulpanov noted:

“The conditions under which the productive forces of the developing countries are embedded in the global capitalist division of labour differ substantially from the relations of interdependence that are usual for highly developed specialized economies. Production in developing countries can be compared to a technological process that is not self-contained and is primarily controlled by foreign monopoly capital. Even today, the young national states still play the role of a ’sub-laborer’ in the capitalist international division of labor.”16

As such, economic, financial, and technological dependency cannot be overcome by merely increasing production. While certain liberated states pursuing capitalist development can at times achieve pronounced economic growth in terms of GDP, this is not accompanied by an “all-round development of the national economy and a reduction of dependency and exploitation by international monopoly capital.”17 The economic contradictions within the country tend to intensify. The social situation of the working masses remains dire. As DDR scholar Herbert Graf concludes, the “process of national liberation is not complete”.18

This continued subjugation also means, however, that “almost all national formations in the developing countries are objectively in antagonistic contradiction to imperialism.”19 On the one hand, this contradiction pushes the liberated states towards confrontation with imperialism. On the other hand, the inevitable intensification of domestic class antagonisms simultaneously drives the indigenous bourgeoisie to compromise with imperialism so that they can maintain their social dominance at home. The young national states developing along capitalist lines thus exhibit an oscillating tendency between collaboration and the aspiration for greater economic self-determination.20 The latter can be driven by both the popular pressure of the working masses or “sections of the emboldened national capital that are trying to expand their economic and political scope” within the capitalist world economy. This can lead to economic and foreign policies that exhibit objective anti-imperialist tendencies, even when the subjective factor is not explicitly anti-imperialist – i.e., policies that “partially limit imperialism’s radius of action” internationally and domestically. In some states such as India and Nigeria, this even culminated in a comprehensive reform strategy to improve the position of national capital vis-à-vis foreign capital.

B. Class relations: A bourgeoisie caught between collaboration and confrontation

The social structure of these societies is shaped by the dependent and multi-sectoral nature of their economies. The degree to which the bourgeoisie has formed as a class “in and for itself” varies greatly across the tricontinent (this is explored below in more detail), but generally there has been a differentiation process between comprador and nationally oriented sections of this class.

In its attempt to secure greater economic leeway or even pursue a “capitalism of its own kind”, the national bourgeoisie in the liberated states will often develop a strategy of “national reformism”, which contains “an anti-imperialist component that varies in strength and consistency depending on the country and the specific phase of development.”21 The bourgeoisie’s oscillation between collaboration and confrontation is frequently seamless: periods of confrontation can be swiftly followed by periods of collaboration without there necessarily being a change of government or political leaders. The foreign policy of non-alignment is an expression of this oscillating tendency.

It is important to recognize that the formation process of the bourgeoisie as a class unfolded very differently in these states than it had in Europe. There were generally three paths along which an indigenous bourgeoisie emerged in the newly liberated states:

The formation process of the domestic bourgeoisie

C. The character and role of the state in countries following capitalist development

“Only in rare cases is the state [in the liberated countries] the dictatorship of a bourgeois class, and even in such cases it is of a bourgeois class whose constitution is not complete and which has very specific characteristics. Usually [state power is exercised by] a dictatorship of an alliance of bourgeois and pro-bourgeois class forces that are undergoing dynamic processes of formation and transformation. The state established in these countries is therefore a state in transition to the bourgeois type.”22

The state in these countries is in a process of “transition to the bourgeois type”. To varying degrees, the characteristics of bourgeois statehood and a corresponding political system are emerging. Common variants of state power are explored further below under “Categorizing the developing countries of capitalist development”.

Here, it is important to note the significant role played by the state in the liberated countries pursuing capitalist development because it is far more pronounced than in comparable historical phases of other countries.23 The state and state-owned sector in these states is utilized by the indigenous bourgeoisie to accelerate the development and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. In this regard, socialist scholars identified a specific kind of “state capitalism” in these liberated countries.24 DDR scholars Klaus Ernst and Hartmut Schilling argued25 that this state capitalism exhibited a contradictory dual character, which embodied both reactionary and progressive-democratic aspects:

“The economic activity of the state serves on the one hand as a catalyst for private capitalist entrepreneurship, partly also for the expansion of foreign monopoly capital, as well as for the realization of the function of the state as ‘the collective capitalist’, which exploits the working class in the state sector and, through the redistribution of national income, imposes the burdens of economic development on the working masses of the people. To a certain extent, this compensates for the lack of dynamism and the peculiar lethargy of domestic private capital.

On the other hand, state capitalism also brings to bear anti-imperialist tendencies and those requirements of economic development which purely profit-oriented private capital is unable to meet. It is also a means for advancing the collective national interest in overcoming backwardness and dependence.

The problem is, the domestic bourgeoisie understands this anti-imperialist, collective national interest in capitalist terms. In other words, it equates this interest with its own class interests: with the creation of more favorable conditions for the exploitation of capital, a higher share in the overall global capitalist system, and a competitive limitation of foreign capital and neo-colonial exploitation.”

In the 1980s, certain Soviet scholars such as Karen Brutenz began arguing that the prospect for “nationally independent capitalist development” were greater than socialist scholars had hitherto maintained: “The idea that dependency will inevitably become deeper and deeper in all cases – a notion that is widespread in the literature and has a tendency towards fatalism – is not entirely correct. In practice, there is no influential social class or political group that is forever bound to the perspective of dependent capitalist development.”26 Nevertheless, this progressive development “does not abolish the contradictions with imperialism, nor does it weaken them. Rather, it modifies them by introducing the element of inter-capitalist contradictions.”27

D. Categorizing the liberated states following capitalist development

Given the heterogeneity of this group of states, a meaningful analysis must differentiate and categorize them according to certain principles. Socialist scholars used various criteria for doing so, but generally used the contradiction between collaboration and confrontation as their starting point. Writing relatively early in the 1960s, for instance, Tjulpanov proposed a very broad differentiation between the “progressive-bourgeois states” (those currently seeking to strengthen their economic independence) and the “reactionary-bourgeois states” (those seeking to integrate with imperialism).28Tyulpanov, pg. 33.

Building off this differentiation in the late 1980s, Graf advanced two methods for categorizing the countries following capitalist development. First, he emphasized the need to have a deeper understanding of the level of socio-economic development in these states. The material conditions of production ultimately shaped their position and prospects in the world economy. He accordingly formulated four subgroups, pointing out that the boundaries between them are relative and fluid:29

Socio-economic categorization: according to the level of the productive forces (1980s)

1. Very low or low level development of productive forces

Agriculture is dominated by pre-capitalist (or even pre-feudalist) relations of production. National industry exists only in a rudimentary form. The capitalist sector is leading the direction of the national economy, but it does not predominate quantitatively.
Examples: many Sub-Saharan states, Nepal, Bhutan, etc.

2. Intermediate level of development of productive forces

Bourgeoisie and proletariat have already formed but are still in the active process of forming themselves as a class “for themselves”.
Examples: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Kenya, etc.

To this can be added those states in which modern productive forces and capitalist relations partially and insularly exist (especially in extractive industries) and where the still widespread semi-feudal or patriarchal social structures are in a process of pro-capitalist transformation.
Examples: Gulf Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Gabon, etc.

3. Relatively high level of productive forces & capitalist relations of production

The capitalist economic sector predominates. The main classes have already constituted themselves and the contradiction between capital and labor is strongly pronounced. Elements of a national upper bourgeoisie and monopoly bourgeoisie are beginning to emerge in varying degrees.
Examples: India, Philippines, Egypt, recently Malaysia and Thailand, etc.

4. High level of productive forces and high industrial export power

The capitalist mode of production is fully developed and permeates and shapes all aspects of society”: Due to these factors – but also due to their geographical location and special political role – these countries represent an exception amongst the former colonies.
Examples: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore

Graf’s second method for categorization rested on an analysis of state power in the countries following capitalist development: How and to what extent is bourgeois statehood developing in these countries? He identified three general forms:30

Political categorization: according to the class nature of the state (1980s)

The national-bourgeois state

Those states in which capitalist development is relatively advanced and the bourgeoisie is largely able to exercise political power alone.
Examples: India, Pakistan, Egypt (post-Nasser), Brazil, & other Latin American states

The feudal-bourgeois state

Countries in which feudal rulers evolved into a capitalist class or share power with an emergent bourgeoisie. State power often takes the form of a monarchy and is prone to collaboration with imperialism.
Examples: Morocco, Jordan, Nepal, and much of the Arabian Peninsula

The proto-bourgeois state

States in which the indigenous bourgeoisie is in a relatively low stage of formation and must therefore exercise political power in alliance with petty-bourgeois intermediary classes or pre-capitalist ruling classes. As a rule, the strongly developed bureaucratic bourgeoisie is the core of this alliance.
Examples: many Sub-Saharan states such as Zaïre, Nigeria, Ghana (post-Nkrumah)

While the degree and intensity to which these states are dependent on foreign imperialism varies, Graf stressed (in 1988) that they are all still “dependent and subordinate components of the capitalist world economic system”.31

Additional categorization: according to relations of production in agriculture

The Iranian-DDR scholar Parviz Khalatbari proposed a different method, namely, to focus on the relations of production in agriculture as the criterium for categorizing the developing states.32 This was due not only to the fact that relations in agriculture varied greatly across the tricontinent (much more so than relations in domestic industries), but also because of the significance of agriculture in the national economies of the liberated states. As a rule, agriculture was by far the largest sector of the economy and made up a considerable portion of the countries’ exports. Khalatbari identified three groups according to this criterium:

Land monopolized domestically
- Countries in which a numerically small class of indigenous landowners hold a monopoly over land ownership and exploits the landless peasant masses.
- Examples: India, Iraq, Egypt, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.
Land collectively owned by village communities
- Countries in which the land is collectively owned by tribal village communities and is divided up amongst the peasant families to work. There is generally no private ownership of the land but a temporary right of tenure.
- Examples: much of Sub-Saharan Africa
Land owned and controlled by foreign capital
- Foreign ownership of land is particularly pronounced and much of the agricultural sector is thus embedded into the reproduction process of the “metropolises” rather than the developing country itself. Land workers are exploited by foreign firms, often on large plantations.
- Examples: Kenia (30%), Algeria (40%), Madagascar (over 50%), Honduras, Guatemala, etc.

The issue with all three of the variants identified by Khalatbari is that they produce little agricultural surplus for the domestic economy and are rarely linked to the national industries. Variant 1, which was the most widespread throughout the tricontinent when the colonial system collapsed, is able to produce a surplus, but it is generally consumed unproductively by the (semi-)feudal landlords. Variant 2 is largely based on subsistence farming and thus unable to produce a significant surplus. Variant 3 sees the surplus siphoned out of the country by foreign capital. As such, land reform is identified as the cardinal question of the second phase of national liberation in many countries.

IV. The liberated states with socialist orientation

There was a smaller number of liberated states (approximately 20 by the early 1980s) in which leading political forces had recognized that further capitalist development of the national economy and continued integration into the capitalist world system would make it impossible to solve the basic social problems confronting their societies. The leaders of this group of states thus spoke out in favor of a development oriented towards socialism. While their conceptions of socialism often varied greatly from one another, Soviet and DDR scholars grouped these countries together under the term “states with socialist orientation”.33

This concept was tied to the theory of “non-capitalist development” (NCD), which had its roots in Marx and Engels’ studies of Russia’s historical development as well as the Comintern’s deliberations on the national question in the 1920s. Communist and workers’ parties elaborated on the theory after the collapse of the colonial system in the 1950s and refined it after decades of praxis in the second half of the 20^th century. The basic premise was that the liberated countries – despite their (pre-)feudal relations of production – could circumvent the capitalist stage of development with the help of the socialist states and create the objective and subjective preconditions for socialism without having to endure the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It was identified as “one of the main ways in which formerly colonized peoples could approach the socialist revolution” in the current epoch.34

Socialist scholars drew on the experiences of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) and the Central Asian Soviet Republic as successful precedents for the strategy of NCD. These states had progressed from feudal relations to socialist relations through a transitionary period of “anti-imperialist, anti-feudal transformation” (approx. 1921 to 1940). With the assistance of the RSFSR, they had then advanced through a period of socialist construction in the 1950s and 1960s to establish a significant industrial base. While many of the insights gained from this practical experience could be informative for revolutionary governments in the newly liberated states across Africa and Asia, socialist leaders and scholars also recognized that the starting points of the former colonies differed in several significant ways:

Mongolia had not been integrated into the capitalist world market to the same extent that many former colonies in Asia and (particularly) Africa were. The relations of dependency in the liberated states made the challenge of driving out foreign capital far more difficult.
The MPR had shared a border with the Soviet Union and the latter had provided significant economic, political, and military support to Mongolia. Apart from DR Afghanistan, the liberated states embarking on the NCD path were often isolated from both the USSR and from one another. States like Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Ethiopia were surrounded by states pursuing a contrary path of development.
The 1921 Mongolian revolution had been led by a party with very close ties to the international communist movement. They started with a firm theoretical grounding in scientific socialism and appreciated the law-governed nature of societal change. This was something that most of the pluralist national liberation movements did not start with, although many began to move toward scientific socialism as the differentiation process within the national liberation struggle intensified (e.g., in PR Congo, PDR Yemen, PR Angola, PR Mozambique, etc.).

Such factors made NCD in the liberated states more vulnerable to imperialist interventions and domestic counterrevolution. As Tyulpanov observed (see above), socio-economic conditions in the former colonies were far more conducive to capitalist development than socialist construction. The path of NCD thus proved tortuous and fraught with contradictions in the liberated states. Some of these problems will be explored here alongside the general developmental dynamics of the socialist oriented states.

A. The economic base: The path of non-capitalist development

The starting point for these states was the same as those liberated states pursuing capitalist development: they were dependent multi-sectoral economies integrated into the international capitalist division of labour. The difference lay in the political orientation of the leading party, which explicitly sought to decouple from the imperialist world system and eliminate capitalist exploitation domestically. The immediate tasks were of “general-democratic” nature: “the consolidation of political independence, the carrying out of agrarian reforms in the interest of the peasantry, elimination of the remnants of feudalism, the uprooting of imperialist economic domination, the restriction of foreign monopolies and their expulsion from the national economy, the creation and development of a national industry, improvement of the living standard, the democratization of social life, the pursuance of an independent and peaceful foreign policy, and the development of economic and cultural co-operation with the socialist and other friendly countries.“35“Moscow Declaration” (1960).

The strategy of non-capitalist development generally included the following economic measures:

Gradual nationalization of the foreign monopolies and the creation of a strong state sector. Foreign and (at a later stage) domestic trade were to be brought under state control. These policies would facilitate the progressive introduction of management and planning in the national economy.
The steady restriction and control over the private capitalist sector, although taking care not to stifle the progressive potential of the national bourgeoisie, especially in the light industries and production of consumer goods.
A rigorous agrarian reform in the interests of the working peasantry to break the power of the feudal landowners and tribal/clerical leaders and help to increase agricultural production – the mainstay of accumulation in the liberated states. The long-term objective was often to organize agricultural production and landownership under a cooperative-based system.

Socialist scholars were wary to emphasize that such policies did not lead to the establishment of unique non-capitalist relations of production.36Tyulpanov, pg. 36. NCD did not represent a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, but rather a transitionary phase in which pre-capitalist and capitalist relations of production would be progressively replaced through a series of intermediate stages that could lead to the creation of socialist relations. The spontaneous development of commodity production was to come under conscious direction the revolutionary-democratic state so as to prevent the emergent bourgeoisie from usurping power. In short, NCD was a way of fulfilling the historical role of the capitalist mode of production – laying the political, material and socio-economic foundations for socialism – without relinquishing political power to the bourgeoisie. This was a volatile process that, as explored further below, required finely tuned relations between politics and economics, between the base and the superstructure in the liberated states.

B. Class differentiation within the national liberation movement

“A decisive criterion for these countries – where the power relations are not yet clearly defined in class terms, where not only social but also political relations are in transition – is that the domestic bourgeoisie does not hold a monopoly on political power.”37

The social structure of these countries was similar to those in the other liberated states: the main classes of the capitalist mode of production were often only in embryonic form, urban intermediary classes dominated the political centers of the country, and the peasantry made up the vast majority of the population. Because of this social situation, it was not the working class, but “revolutionary democrats” from the intelligentsia or military such as Kwame Nkrumah, Abdel Nasser, and Fidel Castro who typically came to enjoy hegemony in the national-democratic parties that emerged out of the liberation movement and began steering these states down the NCD path. While some revolutionary democrats then adopted scientific socialism (e.g., Nkrumah and Castro), others remained distanced and even partially hostile towards communism (e.g., Nasser).

The basic pre-condition for socialist orientation was a) that the bourgeoisie did not dominate the balance of power amongst the domestic classes and b) the revolutionary wing of the national liberation movement prevailed against the conservative and reformist wings, and began forming vanguard parties.38 These “wings” had crystalized within liberation movements in the years following national independence.39 While internal contradictions had typically been overshadowed during the colonial era by the common antagonism with imperialist rule, the diverse classes united in the liberation movement became increasingly conscious of their specific social interests as the country began to develop. This rapid differentiation process – which we have previously explored concretely in revolutionary Mali – generally led to the formation of three political factions in the governments of the socialist oriented states:

The right, which sought to prevent a further deepening of the revolution or even roll back certain policies. Their social basis typically rested on the bureaucratic and commercial bourgeoisie.
The left consisted of revolutionary democrats who progressively adopted scientific socialism as their political philosophy. They were often sustained by trade unions and mass movements such as youth and women’s organisations.
The centrists, who oscillated between the right and left wings, regarding both as unnecessary extremes.

Similar to its role during the anti-feudal struggles in the late 18^th and early 19^th century in Europe, revolutionary democracy in the liberated states reflected a particular radical tendency of the petty bourgeois urban strata. As a political force, revolutionary democrats tended to initially waver between bourgeois and proletarian class lines. In the national liberation context, this often found its expression in what Soviet scholars referred to as “non-proletarian conceptions of socialism”. Theories of “African socialism” or “Arab socialism” often downplayed domestic class antagonisms and treated the state as a neutral instrument that could be used to benefit all classes in the newly liberated states. Over time (and especially through the experience of intensified political struggles within the newly liberated states), many left-wing revolutionary democrats moved away from such nationally specific conceptions of socialism and adopted a class analysis into their political programmes.

As Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana wrote in one of his last works, Class Struggle in Africa:

“The term ‘African socialism’ is […] meaningless and irrelevant. It implies the existence of a form of socialism peculiar to Africa and derived from communal and egalitarian aspects of traditional African society. The myth of African socialism is used to deny the class struggle, and to obscure genuine socialist commitment. […] While there is no hard and fast dogma for socialist revolution, and specific circumstances at a definite historical period will determine the precise form it will take, there can be no compromise over socialist goals. The principles of scientific socialism are universal and abiding, and involve the genuine socialisation of productive and distributive processes.”40

In a similar vein, Congolese leader Marien Ngouabi argued the following at a 1975 conference in Dakar, Senegal:

“[T]here is only one socialism, scientific socialism, the science developed by Marx and Engels. In its capacity as a science, it finds application everywhere, in its general laws, but in particular areas which depend on time and place, certain laws, less general, do not apply and are modified as a result. […] We could, in these conditions, speak of African paths to socialism, not of African socialism”.41

C. Revolutionary state power and the development of vanguard parties

State power was the question of non-capitalist development. As formulated by the 1960 Moscow meeting of communist and workers’ parties, the liberated states pursuing NCD were in the process of creating a new kind of state power, the “national-democratic state”. This was conceived as a transitional form of state power in which anti-imperialist united fronts were led by a core group of revolutionary democrats. Building off Leninist theory at the 7^th Comintern Congress in 1935, the Chinese communist Wang Ming had conceptualized the class character of this revolutionary state in former colonies: It would be “essentially an anti-imperialist government, but not yet a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. In addition to representatives of the proletariat, representatives of the other classes who participate in the struggle for national liberation … will enter this government.” Importantly, this national-democratic state was understood as a transitional phenomenon that, through a series of intermediary stages, could evolve into the kind of people’s democracies that had constructed socialism in Eastern Europe and Asia.

“The national-democratic state is an instrument, but at the same time a reflection of the complicated and contradictory overall social relations. It thus objectively contains a degree of incompleteness, movement, and dynamism – of lower and higher levels of development. In its character, its activity, and its forms and methods of exercising power, there is a concentrated reflection of the degree of class struggle and of the share of power that each class holds. The formula of national democracy as a transitional model is intended to capture precisely this contradictory movement on the basis of class struggle.”42

The coming to power of revolutionary democrats thus represented an initial qualitative shift in the power relations; it was the socio-political starting point for NCD. Yet in this regard, the first phase of NCD was a “revolution from above” initiated for the people by young military officers or intellectuals with passive popular support.43 In the context of intensified internal political struggle and increased external pressure from the West, the progress of NCD required more than just passive popular support. The remnants of the old colonial bureaucracy had to be replaced by a new revolutionary cadre. The social base of the revolutionary-democratic state had to expand; the working masses had to be actively engaged in the management and defense of NCD. This would require the education and political activation of the largely illiterate masses. As Abdel Nasser described it in 1964, it was necessary to advance from “the stage of ‘revolution for the people’ to the stage of ‘revolution carried out by the people’”.44

This contradiction between the initial “revolution from above” and the need to anchor state power in the working masses vexed many revolutionary democrats and was identified as one of the main sources of stagnation or even reversal of NCD.45 From the mid-1960s on, particularly in Africa, there was a growing recognition amongst left-wing revolutionary democrats that the loosely organized nature of the national-democratic parties was no longer able to advance the revolutionary process. A determined and unified vanguard party closely connected with wage labourers and the peasantry was needed to continue down the NCD path and defend the gains from external aggression and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie at home. Initiatives to form vanguard parties could be seen throughout the tricontinent.46 In states like Guinea, Mali, and Tanzania, there were attempts to transform mass parties into vanguard parties. In other states like Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Syria, and Algeria, the military played a key role in advancing the formation of new vanguard parties and had varying degrees of success. Socialist scholars – including many from the “Third World” such as Walter Rodney – identified the formation of a vanguard party of the working people as an “objective necessity” for the successful transition to socialism, although the exact processes would differ in each country.47

Thus, while the first stage of NCD could be initiated from above with the help of the mass party, the second phase required the revolutionary democrats to muster “the inner strength for one’s own transformation”. This was the paradox of NCD: the vanguard party was often formed after the revolutionary process had begun.

“Ultimately, the problem of the formation of the vanguard party is the problem of the ideological and political consolidation of the proponents of non-capitalist development. The question of the creation of such parties is a part of the general political struggle for one or the other paths of development. For this very reason, the completion of NCD and the transition to the socialist stage of the revolution are impossible without the realization of the leading role of the vanguard party.”48

D. Categorizing the liberated states with socialist orientation

Due to the transitional and very volatile nature of NCD, it was difficult to categorize the states with socialist orientation. The level of productive forces varied greatly and, despite extensive efforts, none of these states had been able to free themselves from imperialist dependency by the end of the 1980s.49 In some cases, the dependency of these states had in fact deepened in the 1970s and 1980s, as the West began to increasingly develop economic mechanisms (e.g., “Wandel durch Handel” and debt traps) alongside their political and military strangulation techniques.

Socialist scholars began differentiating these states based upon the development of their superstructure. In a lecture at the 1984 conference “Theoretical development problems of the young national states on the path to socialism”, the Soviet professor for State and Law V.E. Cirkin outlined a categorization that proved both contentious and influential in the socialist states. He identified the most general, fundamental traits of revolutionary-democratic power in the liberated states as follows:50

It arises as a result of the political victory of a democratic revolution of the people.
It embodies multi-class power: it does not represent the political rule of one class of society or of an alliance of related or friendly classes, but rather a bloc of diverse or even opposing social forces (of the working people and a part of the non-working people), which has emerged in the struggle for general democratic goals and represents “the people” at a specific historical moment of a country.
It contains the seeds of socialist revolution.
Conflicts of interest between the working classes and the non-working members of the democratic bloc increase with the deepening of the revolution.

Considering this, Cirkin concludes that there is no clear qualitative boundary between revolutionary-democratic and socialist power. Only once the revolutionary-democratic state has exhausted all of its progressive potential can the transition to a socialist state follow. This is a protracted and contradictory process; it took two decades in Mongolia (1921–1940), but the conditions there were much more favorable.

Soviet literature identified two main types of revolutionary-democratic state: the national-democratic and popular-democratic, both of which could be seen in Africa and Asia.

Two forms of revolutionary-democratic state power on the path towards the socialist state

The national-democratic state

The first stage of non-capitalist development (although some liberated states have stagnated at this stage).
After two decades of experience since this concept was developed in 1960, the following can be said:
- This state emerges through national-democratic revolution. Hegemony is exercised by non-proletarian layers of working people. Petty bourgeois classes dominate the bloc of democratic forces. The exploiting classes still belong to the bloc.
- The national-democratic party is still relatively weak in its exercise of power: The party does not play the main role in the political system, the state apparatus does.
- Socio-economic reforms are of an overall national nature: socialist elements are only weakly represented in them.
- Foreign policy is still characterized by oscillations between capitalist and socialist states

Examples: Ghana (until 1966), Mali (until 1968), Egypt (until the early 1970s), Somalia (until the late 1970s), Jamaica (until 1980), VDRJ (1969–1972), Congo-Brazzaville (1963–1969). To the present day (1988, at the time of publication): Algeria, Afghanistan, Burma, Seychelles, Tanzania, Nicaragua, etc.

The people’s democratic state

A mature, developed form of the revolutionary-democratic state: “it is on the threshold of growing into a socialist state and is its immediate predecessor, although this process is historically protracted.”
Its general characteristics are:
- It emerges out of a popular democratic revolution when hegemony belongs to non-proletarian forces (often of military or intelligentsia origins) that have adopted scientific socialism: “Since this is the ideology of the working class, the leading role of these forces can arguably be understood as a specific, indirect form of working-class hegemony, or at least as an approach, an element of this hegemony, a step towards it.”
- As such, this state is not to be fully equated with the people’s democracies seen in Eastern Europe and Asia : the working class did not exercise direct hegemony in the people’s democratic revolution; the role of the working masses in shaping state policy is still underdeveloped.
- In the democratic bloc, the working class dominates, the petty-bourgeois strata have a certain influence, and the exploiting classes have practically no position of power.
- A vanguard party of the working people operates as the ruling party. It is in the process of developing towards a vanguard of the proletariat, towards a communist party. This vanguard plays the leading role in state and society: there is a rejection of bourgeois constitutionalism.
- In the structure of the state apparatus, the old forms and institutions still exist, but they are filled with a new content; however, new institutions prevail, which is why the entire state structure is developing according to a new scheme of connections and relationships.
- Socialist elements are becoming increasingly important in socio-economic transformations.

Examples: Angola, Benin, Congo, Mozambique, PDR Yemen, Ethiopia.

The process of national-democratic –> people’s democratic –> socialist state is achievable if internal or external reaction can be successfully suppressed. In the late 1980s, these people’s democracies were still in the early stages of formation. One of the major policy shifts brought about by Gorbachev’s doctrine of “New Thinking” was to wind down support for the socialist oriented states and focus on relations with larger capitalist states in the “Global South” like Brazil or Argentina. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist world system brought the prospect of non-capitalist development to an end. As premised in the concept of the “revolutionary world process”, once one pillar fell, the others fell apart as well.

V. Reflections

Revisiting these analyses from the 20^th century today, there are several interesting points to critically reflect on.

Firstly, on the methodology:

Central to the dialectical materialist method of Soviet-DDR scholarship was the question of class struggle, both internationally and domestically. To understand developments in the “Third World”, it was necessary to determine the character of the epoch, to grasp how the main contradiction – that between capital and labour – was being concretely expressed at each level globally. For the newly liberated states, this meant understanding their specific position in the capitalist international division of labour, examining the balance of class forces within each country, analysing the relations of production upon which society was developing, and identifying how oscillations in policy were reflections of the international and domestic class struggle.

When studying this interaction of political, social, and economic factors, the socialist scholars developed categories to capture the underlying tendencies unfolding in different states. Capitalist or socialist oriented development; national-bourgeois or feudal-bourgeois state power; the national-democratic or people’s democratic state – these were determined by the concrete conditions of the class struggle in each country, which were of course always changing and liable to both setbacks and sudden advances.

Secondly, on the question of capitalist states in the Global South:

This is a contentiously debated question amongst progressive forces today. Can a bourgeois state that is fostering capitalist relations of production play a progressive role on the world stage? Soviet and DDR scholars concluded that they could. The caveats and inconsistencies were always underscored, but socialist scholars did argue that these states often had an objectively anti-imperialist effect internationally, especially when state power was national-bourgeois in character. For example, India was objectively narrowing the playing field for imperialism when leaders such as Nehru or Indira Gandhi pushed agendas such as the Non-Aligned Movement or the refusal to support the West’s efforts to overthrow the Soviet-allied government in Afghanistan. These anti-imperialist tendencies were inconsistent and volatile because the subjective factor was weak in these capitalist-oriented states. In other words, socialist scholars emphasized that the strength of a “Third World” state’s confrontation with imperialism ultimately depended on this subjective factor, on the political leadership’s orientation.

Thirdly, on the prospects of socialist development in the so-called underdeveloped states of the Global South:

In the socialist-oriented states of the late 20^th century, the (subjective) political factor was advancing, despite the significant economic challenges faced by these states. The transition of some national-democratic states to people’s democracies exemplified this dynamic. Here, states led by revolutionary democrats grew progressively closer to the socialist world system and helped to not only create obstacles for imperialism, but to actively suppress it. For instance, by facilitating the armed liberation struggle in Central Africa and West Asia.51 What hampered these states most was their objective socio-economic situation: due to their isolation from the socialist countries in Europe and Asia, their colonially deformed economies, the relatively underdeveloped socialist international division of labour at the time, and the sheer strength of the imperialist camp, it proved immensely difficult to break out of neocolonial dependency.

Finally, on the contrast with the contemporary anti-imperialist struggle:

Today, with the rollback of the October Revolution and the wider socialist world system, the subjective factor is undoubtedly weaker (i.e., less socialist oriented) than it was in the 20^th century. At the same time, the political and economic development of certain “Global South” states – especially the BRICS – has gived rise to new tendencies that are objectively creating obstacles for US-led imperialism. This is evident, for example, in the West’s inability to bring about regime change in Syria or the erosion of France’s political and economic control over West Africa.

In this sense, the anti-imperialist struggle from the last century has almost been flipped on its head: whereas anti-imperialism had previously been driven by strong subjective forces that were significantly restrained by their economic realities, today the strengthened economies of some “Global South” states are objectively limiting the scope for imperialism without being driven by explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist governments.52 This rather paradoxical situation is a symptom of the deep crisis that the communist and working-class movements have been mired in since 1990.

Footnotes

[1] This term was only rarely used by scholars in the USSR and DDR. It is used throughout the rest of this text as a shorthand for Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

[2] The “Third World” misleadingly implies that there is a bloc of states operating outside of the systemic conflict between capitalism and socialism. While the states in the tricontinent indeed occupied a special place in the international capitalist and socialist systems, they did not (and could not) operate outside of them. The term “Global South” is geographically problematic and says nothing about the class character of different states. “Developing states” is limited by its relative nature; there are no states that are not developing.

[3] Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).

[4] “Moscow Declaration” (1960). https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/other/1960statement.htm

[5] Tyulpanov used a similar logic for those liberated states pursuing socialist-oriented development (which will be explored further below): their conditions and starting point differed greatly from the transition to socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat, so the laws formulated in the political economy of socialism could not adequately apply here either.

[6] This thesis was challenged by scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, who argued that there was only one world system, and the socialist states held a certain position within it. Socialist scholars like Tyulpanov understood that the two world systems were not strictly separate entities but argued that the laws governing the capitalist and socialist systems were fundamentally of a different character.

[7] The United Nations used this term “developing states” at the time. A number of socialist scholars adopted it, although they warned that it tends to obfuscate the exploiter and the exploited.

[8] S. Tyulpanov, Politische Ökonomie und ihre Anwendung in den Entwicklungsländern (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1972), pg. 23.

[9] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1988), pg. 34.

[10] Tyulpanov, pg. 27.

[11] In German the term is Zwischenschichten. The Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad used the term “intermediary classes” to describe the same phenomenon.

[12] Tyulpanov, pg. 30.

[13] This term was used by socialist scholars to differentiate the states that gained their independence after the collapse of the colonial system (post-1945) from those colonies that had gained their independence in the previous century (e.g., much of Latin America) and the countries that had not formally lost their sovereignty during the colonial era but were still subjugated to imperialist dependency (e.g., China and Iran).

[14] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 61.

[15] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 64.

[16] Emphasis added. Tyulpanov, pg. 66.

[17] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 67.

[18] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 66.

[19] Tyulpanov, pg. 30.

[20] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 71.

[21] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 71.

[22] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 72.

[23] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 69.

[24] R. A. Ulkanowski, Der Sozialismus und die befreiten Länder (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1973), pg. 291.

[25] Cited in Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 69.

[26] K. Brutenz, Die befreiten Länder in der Welt von heute (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981), pg. 48.

[27] It is worth noting that Brutenz (deputy chief of the CPSU’s International Department since 1975) was a close ally of Alexander Yakovlev (the “godfather of glasnost”) and would later become a key theoretician of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” in international politics, which, among other things, sought to significantly reduce Soviet support for the socialist oriented states in the tricontinent. This view was not shared by most DDR scholars and SED politicians at the time. Generally, there needs to be closer examination of the impact of “New Thinking” in the socialist states’ international analyses and policies.

[28] Tyulpanov, pg. 33.

[29] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 71.

[30] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 75.

[31] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 71.

[32] P. Khalatbari, Ökonomische Unterentwicklung: Mechanismus – Probleme – Ausweg (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1972), pg. 107.

[33] Originally, only the term “non-capitalist development” was utilized to describe the process unfolding in these states, but socialist scholars were never satisfied with it, for it merely denoted a negation of capitalism. As such, the term “states with socialist orientation” was adopted in the 1970s.

[34] Author collective, Sozialistische Orientierung national befreiter Staaten (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1985) pg. 7.

[35] “Moscow Declaration” (1960).

[36] Tyulpanov, pg. 36.

[37] E. Dummer and E. Langer, Internationale Arbeiterbewegung und revolutionärer Kampf (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1973), pg. 357.

[38] Author collective, Sozialistische Orientierung national befreiter Staaten (1985), pg. 30.

[39] The Portuguese colonies are an exception to this rule because the differentiation process within the movement unfolded during the relatively prolonged struggle for independence.

[40] K. Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (London: Panaf Books, 1970), p. 26.

[41] M. Ngouabi, Vers la construction d’une société socialiste en Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975), p. 32–34. [Translated by the author]

[42] Helmut Mardek, “Der Platz der Arbeiterklasse in den staatstheoretischen Vorstellungen der revolutionären Demokratie“ in Nichtkapitalistischer Entwicklungsweg Aktuelle Probleme in Theorie und Praxis (Protokoll einer Konferenz) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973), pg. 184.

[43] C. Mährdel und N.A. Simonija, Besonderheiten der Herausbildung von Parteien und ihrer Wechselbeziehungen zum Staatsapparat in Ländern nichtkapitalistischer Entwicklung, in Partei und Staat in den Ländern mit sozialistischer Orientierung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1974) pg. 11.

[44] Cited in C. Mährdel and N.A. Simonija (1974), pg. 11.

[45] Many communists (also those in the former colonies) identified the failure to expand the social basis of the revolutionary-democratic state as a serious vulnerability in countries where NCD had been smothered or broken off – E.g., Egypt, Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, etc.

[46] Particularly advanced forms of vanguard parties could be found in the PR Congo, PDR Yemen, PR Angola, and PR Mozambique, but formation processes were also underway in many other states including Benin, Algeria, Egypt, Madagascar, Tanzania, Guinea, and at a time Burma.

[47] “How the transformation of the national democratic parties into parties of scientific socialism will take place, how and when the Marxist-Leninist parties will emerge where they do not exist — to speak of this would be premature. What is indisputable is merely that the gradual turning away from capitalism in the process of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle can be initiated in the national-democratic stage of the revolution under the leadership of revolutionary democracy, but the successful conclusion of this process and the transition to socialist construction and later the guarantee of the full victory of socialism are impossible without the party of scientific socialism, without the leadership of the working class.” Uljanovsky in Problems of Peace and Socialism, 1970, iss. 06.

[48] C. Mährdel and N.A. Simonija (1974), pg. 60.

[49] Author collective, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (1988), pg. 35.

[50] V. E. Cirkin, Die Entwicklung der Staatsmacht in den Ländern sozialistischer Orientierung, in Asien, Afrika Lateinamerika, 1984, iss. 12 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984), pg. 225 – 233.

[51] The People’s Republic of Congo, led by the Congolese Party of Labour, worked closely with the Cubans to support the People’s Republic of Angola and combat the US proxies in the country. The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen helped arm the Palestinian resistance and supported the Marxist-led Dhofar Rebellion in Oman.

[52] China is somewhat of a special case amongst the BRICS states, but regardless of how one characterizes its national economy today, China is currently not leading an international effort to overturn global capitalism, as the USSR had.

Bibliography

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Autorenkollektiv, Sozialistische Orientierung national befreiter Staaten (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1985).

Autorenkollektiv, Staatsrecht junger Nationalstaaten (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1988).

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