In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Ripe for Revolution traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.
These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge ahead through trial and error. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.
Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.
>> Hello, I'm Niall Ferguson, the Milbank family senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution and chair of the Hoover History Working Group. And we've just had the pleasure of hearing from my old friend, Professor Jeremy Friedman from Harvard Business School on the subject of his latest book. Jeremy is the Marvin Bauer Professor of Business Administration at HBS, where he teaches in the biggie unit, business and government in the international economy.
But unusually for a Harvard Business School professor, Jeremy's interested in socialism. His first book, the Shadow Cold War, came out in 2015. The second is ripe for revolution, building socialism in the third world. And that's what he talks about today. Jeremy, congratulations on the book. I understand it's the second part of a projected trilogy.
How does a Professor at HBS come to write a trilogy on the history of socialism? This must be a first.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: Well, as I said, I didn't start out at Harvard Business School. But I think the big issue for me was just trying to understand the trajectory of the left in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.
So we think about the left today. It's not the way we think about the popular front of the 1930s and such. It's not necessarily based on mobilizing the working classes in exactly the same way. And so I was interested in that right, because the left is still an important political phenomenon, and I wanted to understand how it came to be what it is today.
And so I saw the 1960s as an important inflection point. And so the trilogy is sort of built around that transformation, one book each for one of the three so called worlds of the Cold War, the first, second, and third.
>> Niall Ferguson: This volume is very much focused on what was cold in the 1960s and 1970s, the third world, not by the Soviets, but certainly in the United States.
And you've picked a group of countries to focus on, Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. It's a tremendously rich book, and I really encourage people to buy it and read it. But let's just pick a couple of those to zoom in on. I'm going to pick the controversial ones that have attracted a lot of scholarship in the past.
Let's start with Chile. What's going on there? I think most people understand that Allende comes to power. He's a left wing president, and the United States is not happy about that. And there's a sense that the United States does at least some of the work that leads to his being overthrown.
You tell the story from a very different perspective. How is it different?
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: So the existing story is, as you say, is very much about external forces. It's about the role of the United States, especially. And I'm not saying the United States was not an important factor. It certainly was.
But I think what's been missed in this is the domestic politics and how important the divisions inside the Chilean regime were, and for the following reason. I mean, you look at this geography and basically comes down to one of two versions. Either Allende was just, you know, a democratic socialist who was targeted by the United States, or he was a communist totalitarian bent on turning Chile into a dictatorship.
And the truth is he was neither. He was actually a democrat who wanted to build soviet style socialism, which is a contradiction, it seems, because that hasn't happened. But that's precisely the contradiction at the center of the regime. There was always this tension about how do you maintain democracy, but move towards actual socialist revolution?
The divisions over how to do that, I think, are what primarily brought down the regime.
>> Niall Ferguson: One of the things you pointed out in our seminar was how keenly involved the Soviets were in the Allende regime. Talk a bit about what you found in the Soviet archives.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: In which regime?
>> Niall Ferguson: In the Allende regime in Chile.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: Well, yes, I mean, I found that every single year in the Soviet archives, there's a thousand page file of the ambassador's conversations with Chilean political figures, leaders of the Communist party, the Socialist Party, the radicals, Mapu, others. Allende, he's meeting with them every single week, and they're discussing day to day strategy of what the regime is going to do next.
Which bill should they introduce? How should they fight this election? What should they do about a peasant seizure of land in the south and such, or a factory strike? Allende resigns multiple times, and the Soviets have to talk the Communists and Socialist leaders into bringing Allende back because he's willing to quit over the divisions within his own coalition.
And so the Soviets are basically sort of managing the day to day operations of individual political parties, coaching them step by step.
>> Niall Ferguson: So it wasn't entirely wrong for people in Washington to think that this was a Moscow backed regime trying to take Chile into a soviet style system of state control of the economy.
This wasn't some fantasy.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: Well, I think it would have looked that way from the outside. I don't think the Soviets themselves thought they were in control of the situation. I don't think they intended to be in control of the situation. I think they were just a heavily involved coach.
But in a certain sense, just like any other coach, they're not on the field. The players control the outcome of the game, but the Soviets were sort of calling a lot of the plays.
>> Niall Ferguson: Now, part of what you're describing here is the aftermath of decolonization. It's the collapse of what had been European colonial regimes that creates the opportunities either for civil war or for the creation of some kind of socialist regime.
This is especially clear in the case of Angola, which goes from being a Portuguese colony to being a major battleground of the cold war in the course of the 1970s. What's your take on developments there? The Cubans play a role in addition to the Soviets, but help us understand better what's going on in Angola in the seventies.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: What's happening in Angola in the 707, first of all, Angola has a tripartite division of the liberation movements. The FNLA backed by the US initially, later on by the French, Zaire, Chinese, Unida, backed to a certain degree by the Chinese, and later on by South Africans. There's a competition who's going to be the liberation movement that sort of rules Angola.
And the MPLA is the one backed by the Soviets, the Cubans and others. And they end up winning in part because they hold on to the capital and access to the oil reserves and therefore are able to fund the war in a certain sense. But what happens in the course of that is that with the Soviets, the Cubans, the East Germans and others, they kind of build a Leninist political system, which you have a party state where the party has the nomenclature that controls the institutions.
They have a secret police. They built a very strong military, and they fund all this from selling oil abroad, which is being extracted by Gulf Oil, which is an american company, in part along with other western companies. You have a Leninist political system bent on constructing socialism that is being funded by essentially western businesses.
And so you have this marriage of a socialist political elite in control of a capitalist economy still tied to the west. That not only survives the post colonial war, it survives the post cold war civil war. And the MPLA remains in power today and still in charge of the oil revenue, essentially.
>> Niall Ferguson: But in the end, are you left with something that is still recognizably socialist? You showed a map of southern Africa and said this kind of quasi Leninist model persists to an amazing extent. I get your central message, which is that they kind of abandon Stalinists approaches to the economy, but they retained Leninist approaches to politics.
There's one party and it's in charge all the time, but is there really anything left of socialism by the end?
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: Well, the MPLA itself disavows socialism, they no longer claim to be socialist. But the regime that remains is a regime that was constructed in the name of socialism.
So in a certain sense, and nobody would say that Angola today is a model of socialism. They don't claim to be socialist, but the country as it's currently constructed is a product of the attempt to build socialism. In a sense, the infrastructure is still there and was never removed.
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, at a time when many young Americans seem quite confused about what socialism is, it's incredibly enriching to have a new history of socialism that looks at what it was and how it evolved. And I look forward very much to the third part of this extraordinary trilogy.
The book once again is Ripe for Revolution, Building Socialism in the Third World. The author is Jeremy Friedman, and watch this space for volume three. Thanks very much, Jeremy.
>> Professor Jeremy Friedman: Thank you.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jeremy Friedman is the Marvin Bower associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution over the course of the twentieth century, as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization.
He is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (2015), and has published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies, as well as The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times.
