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Setting Straight Some Popular Misconceptions About Revolutions
in the Underdeveloped Countries
1
The eminently revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie consists in having introduced the
economy into history in a decisive and irreversible way. As the faithful master of this
economy, the bourgeoisie has since its appearance been the real (though sometimes
unconscious) master of “universal history.” For the first time universal history
ceased to be some metaphysical fantasy or some act of the World Spirit and became a
material reality as concrete as the trivial existence of each individual. Since the
emergence of commodity production, nothing in the world has escaped the implacable
development of this neo-Fate, the invisible economic rationality: the logic of the
commodity. Totalitarian and imperialist in essence, it demands the entire planet as
its terrain and the whole of humanity as its servants. Wherever the commodity is
present there are only slaves.
2
To the bourgeoisie’s oppressive coherence in keeping humanity in prehistory,
the revolutionary movement — a direct and unintended product of bourgeois capitalist
domination — has for more than a century counterposed the project of a liberatory
coherence that is the work of each and everyone, the free, conscious intervention in the
creation of history: the real abolition of all class divisions and the
suppression of the economy.
3
Wherever it has penetrated — that is, almost everywhere in the world — the
virus of the commodity never stops toppling the most ossified socioeconomic structures,
enabling millions of human beings to discover through poverty and violence the historical
time of the economy. Wherever it penetrates it spreads its destructive character,
dissolving the vestiges of the past and pushing all antagonisms to their extreme. In a
word, it hastens social revolution. All the walls of China crumble in its path, and
scarcely has it established itself in India when everything around it disintegrates and
agrarian revolutions explode in Bombay, in Bengal and in Madras. The precapitalist zones
of the world accede to bourgeois modernity, but without its material basis. There also, as
in the case of the proletariat, the forces that the bourgeoisie has contributed toward
liberating, or even creating, are now going to turn against the bourgeoisie and its native
servants: the revolution of the underdeveloped is becoming one of the main chapters of
modern history.
4
If the problem of revolution in the underdeveloped countries poses itself in a
particular way, this is due to the very development of history: In these countries the
general economic backwardness — fostered by colonial domination and the social strata
that support it — and the underdevelopment of productive forces have impeded the
development of socioeconomic structures that would have made immediately practicable the
revolutionary theory elaborated in the advanced capitalist societies for more than a
century. As they enter the struggle none of these countries have any significant heavy
industry, and the proletariat is far from being the majority class. It is the poor
peasantry that plays that role.
5
The various national liberation movements emerged well after the rout of the workers
movement resulting from the defeat of the Russian revolution, which right from its victory
was turned into a counterrevolution in the service of a bureaucracy claiming to be
communist. They have thus suffered — either consciously or with false consciousness
— from all the defects and weaknesses of that generalized counterrevolution; and with
the additional burden of their generally backward conditions, they have been unable to
overcome any of the limits imposed on the defeated revolutionary movement. And it is
precisely because of this defeat that the colonized and semicolonized countries have had
to fight imperialism by themselves. But because they have fought only imperialism and on
only a part of the total revolutionary terrain, they have only partially driven it
out. The oppressive regimes that have installed themselves wherever national liberation
revolutions believed themselves victorious are only one of the guises by which the return
of the repressed takes place.
6
No matter what forces have participated in them, and regardless of the radicalism of
their leaderships, the national liberation movements have always led the
ex-colonial societies to modern forms of the state and to pretensions of modernity
in the economy. In China, father-image of underdeveloped revolutionaries, the
peasants’ struggle against American, European and Japanese imperialism ended up,
because of the defeat of the Chinese workers movement in 1925-1927, by bringing to power a
bureaucracy on the Russian model. The Stalino-Leninist dogmatism with which this
bureaucracy gilds its ideology — recently reduced to Mao’s red catechism —
is nothing but the lie, or at best the false consciousness, that accompanies its
counterrevolutionary practice.
7
Fanonism and Castro-Guevaraism are the false consciousness through which the peasantry
carries out the immense task of ridding precapitalist society of its semifeudal and
colonialist leftovers and acceding to a national dignity previously trampled on by
reactionary colonists and ruling classes. Ben-Bellaism, Nasserism, Titoism and Maoism are
the ideologies that signal the end of these movements and their takeover by
petty-bourgeois or military urban strata: the reconstitution of exploitive society with
new masters and based on new socioeconomic structures. Wherever the peasantry has fought
victoriously and brought to power the social strata that marshaled and directed its
struggle, it has been the first to suffer their violence and to pay the enormous cost of
their domination. Modern bureaucracy, like that of antiquity (in China, for example),
builds its power and prosperity on the superexploitation of the peasants: ideology changes
nothing in the matter. In China or Cuba, Egypt or Algeria, everywhere it plays the same
role and assumes the same functions.
8
In the process of capital accumulation, the bureaucracy fulfills what was only the
unrealized ideal of the bourgeoisie. What the bourgeoisie has taken centuries to
accomplish “through blood and mud,” the bureaucracy wants to achieve consciously
and “rationally” within a few decades. But the bureaucracy cannot accumulate
capital without accumulating lies: that which constituted the original sin of
capitalist wealth is sinisterly referred to as “socialist primitive
accumulation.” Everything that the underdeveloped bureaucracies present as or imagine
to be socialism is nothing but a realized neo-mercantilism. “The bourgeois
state minus the bourgeoisie” (Lenin) cannot go beyond the historical tasks of the
bourgeoisie, and the most advanced industrial countries show to the less developed ones
the image of their own development to come. Once in power, the Bolshevik
bureaucracy could find nothing better to propose to the revolutionary Russian proletariat
than to “follow the lessons of German state-capitalism.” All the so-called
“socialist” powers are nothing but underdeveloped imitations of the bureaucracy
that dominated and defeated the revolutionary movement in Europe. Whatever the bureaucracy
is able to do or is forced to do will neither emancipate the laboring masses nor even
substantially improve their social condition, because those aims depend not only on the
productive forces but also on their appropriation by the producers. In any case,
what the bureaucracy will not fail to do is create the material conditions to realize
both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done less?
9
In the peasant-bureaucratic revolutions only the bureaucracy aims consciously and
lucidly at power. The seizure of power is the historical moment when the bureaucracy lays
hold of the state and declares its independence vis-à-vis the revolutionary masses before
even having eliminated the vestiges of colonialism and achieving effective independence
from foreign powers. Upon entering the state, the new class suppresses all autonomy of the
masses by pretending to suppress its own autonomy and devote itself to the service of the
masses. Exclusive owner of the entire society, it declares itself the exclusive
representative of that society’s superior interests. In so doing, the bureaucratic
state is the fulfillment of the Hegelian State. Its separation from society sanctions at
the same time the society’s separation into antagonistic classes: the momentary union
of the bureaucracy and the peasantry is only the fantastic illusion through which they
jointly accomplish the immense historical tasks of the absent bourgeoisie. The
bureaucratic power built on the ruins of precapitalist colonial society is not the
abolition of class antagonisms; it merely substitutes new classes, new conditions of
oppression and new forms of struggle for the old ones.
10
The only people who are really underdeveloped are those who see a positive value in the
power of their masters. The rush to catch up with capitalist reification remains the best
road to reinforced underdevelopment. The question of economic development is inseparable
from the question of who is the real owner of the economy, the real master of labor power.
Everything else is nothing but the babble of specialists.
11
So far the revolutions in the underdeveloped countries have only tried to imitate
Bolshevism in various ways. From now on the point is to go beyond it through the power
of the soviets.
MUSTAPHA KHAYATI
1967
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology entitled “Contributions Toward Rectifying Public Opinion
Concerning the Revolution in the Underdeveloped Countries”).
No copyright.
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