An important aspect of the Afro-Asian bourgeois revolution lies in the fact that the leaders of the new nation states are adopting concepts and language that certainly cannot be aligned with those used, in their time, by the Cromwells and Robespierres. Despite being the representatives of bourgeois forces, the Nehrus, Sukarnos and Nassers use a phraseology that the revolutionary proletariat of Europe has already seen decorating the mouths of the leaders of reformist socialism. This is no fluke. The cause of this phenomenon is two-fold: first, the epoch in which the anti-colonialist revolutions have broken out; second, the intellectual formation of the currents which struggle against colonialist imperialism. Because these were born during the imperialist epoch, that’s to say the epoch at which the international bourgeoisie disowned its own class ideology (to achieve a social camouflage) and turned instead to the pronouncements of recent economic schools, the Afro-Asian bourgeois revolutions can only find inspiration in the same themes. On the other hand, the conditions in which the anti-colonialist political parties had to struggle in the past – conditions which were determined by colonial occupation – have imposed an ideological distinction, whose fundamental motif is, precisely, anti-imperialism.
From a practical point of view the result is that critical analysis of the ideological baggage of the Afro-Asian regimes only reveals a weak percentage of the ingredients equating to liberal doctrines and the economic liberalism which characterised the bourgeois revolution in Europe. By contrast, theories on planned economy, on state management, on “public” property, on social security, conceived by European reformist socialism in the last century, take pride of place and now have won the “freedom of the city” in the brains of everybody in the bourgeois state. Themes dear to anti-imperialism, to the peaceful coexistence of states, large and small, to democratic pacifism, have developed in parallel with these anti-liberal ideologies. But, we repeat, these ideological principles perfectly match, even though they might use different terminology, those that form the doctrinal heritage of European reformist socialism.
The difference between the old European reformists and the leaders of the new Afro-Asian regimes is the fact that the latter base their affirmations of principle on a situation that was missing for our reformists. The European reformists postulated the unlimited progress of a capitalism which, on the contrary, was entering fully into old age and was heading towards the terrible convulsive crises of imperialism. The Afro-Asian leaders make no mistake when they prophesy uninterrupted social progress, because they are still at the dawn of their industrial revolution.
The Afro-Asian regimes which can apply their revisionist ideologies predicting the pacific passing of capitalism, or even the possibility of avoiding the capitalist stage through real social and economic progress will therefore be in a position to energetically oppose the work of revolutionary Marxism when it tries to assume the role of political guide to the local proletariat. We can foresee that the transformation of immense social agglomerations, within which forms of production that have existed for centuries, if not millennia, lie dormant, will bring immense prestige to the regimes that will champion it, and will lend an appearance of truth to the ideologies that they promote. This will not be the first time that the revolutionary Marxist movement finds itself confronted by a bourgeois revolution led within forms of state capitalism and which attempts to pass itself off as an anti-capitalist revolution. Stalinist Russia is there for us to recall.