On October 30, Jeremy Friedman, an associate professor of business administration and international economy at Harvard Business School, lectured on “Socialism as Praxis: 'Second World'-'Third World' Relations and the Evolution of the Socialist Model During the Cold War.” This lecture was the second in the lecture series “Overcoming Bipolarity: New Approaches to the Cold War,” which is sponsored by the Princeton Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Collaborative History.

            Friedman framed the lecture as a collage of his two books, Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World and Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, as well as of possible directions for future research. For Friedman, one such direction is constructing a history of socialism, a field which he contends is remarkably understudied. While we do have national histories of socialism— in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China, for instance—there is no integrated, well-established field of study. Friedman attributes this to the claim that “real socialism has never been tried in practice,” which he characterizes as a “perfectly legitimate political position, but it is not a historical position.” In fact, he argues that real capitalism has never been tried either.

            Instead, the study of capitalism is focused on how theory diverges from practice, which is how Friedman suggests scholars approach the study of socialism. In his words, the history of capitalism, and of socialism, is an “iterative process between theory and practice.” Both have undergone a series of transformations. Just as capitalism “evolves on a global scale,” socialism “does not evolve in a vacuum.” Friedman uses the ‘Third World’ to study these transformations, describing it aptly as a “laboratory for socialism’s development.” At this point, Friedman posed several key questions that are central to thinking about socialism in the ‘Third World.’ During the lecture, he largely focused on the following: “What kind of political system makes sense for introducing socialism? ... How do you build socialism in an agrarian economy? … What is the role of the state versus the private sector in economic development?”

            Before addressing these questions, he distinguished himself as having defined the term “ideology” in a notably novel way, arguing in Ripe for Revolution that it is a “systematically simplified way of understanding reality that facilitates judgement and action” (264). In other words, ideology is the “prism” through which we can distinguish the most “salient” aspects of reality. For Friedman, ideology does not determine policy but rather shapes the narrative that informs policy. According to him, because “ideology is shaping the process of policy making behind the scenes,” to fully grasp the different socialist projects in the ‘Third World’ and answer the aforementioned questions it is important to understand the varying and changing ideologies that inform them.

            At first, the Soviet approach was focused on supporting state-led industry and building a robust working class. As opposed to Chinese socialism at the time, the Soviets were open to foreign investment. In Indonesia during the 1950s, they were focused on promoting an economy conducive to communism by building the tin industry. In 1960, socialists in Guinea theorized that changing the economy first would change social structures by extension, growing the working class to the point where it would be able to form a powerful communist party. Eventually, the president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, discovered the plot and expelled the Soviet ambassador. A similar series of events occurred in Mali a few years later. As a result, the Soviets began to realize the disadvantages of this economic model, namely that it was expensive and led to political hostility between Soviet diplomats and the regimes in countries like Guinea and Mali.

            In the 1960s, Julius Nyerere, a leading Tanzanian politician, developed Ujamaa, a socialist political theory focused on prioritizing agriculture. One central idea was to develop a robust agricultural industry and use the surplus to develop. This would allow Tanzania to avoid receiving foreign aid, eliminating the risk of an independence-subverting reliance on foreign nations. According to Friedman, there were “dueling Soviet evaluations of Ujamaa” by the late 1960s. Eventually, Ujamaa led to forced labor and a weak industry. Without foreign aid, there was no technology, resulting in “unproductive communal farms.” Since there was no surplus, Tanzania fell deep into debt and the model collapsed. The Soviet conclusion was that starting with agriculture and slowly pursuing a socialist society does not work.

            Eventually, Soviet attention turned to Prime Minister Lopo do Nascimento in Angola, who was inspired by the model of socialism employed in Cuba. Instead of closing off the nation to foreign investment as in Tanzania and elsewhere, he allowed foreign capitalists to develop resources. Friedman notes that the prevailing view was that, if a socialist regime maintains strong political control, foreign investment can be a useful means to advancing industry.

            Here, Friedman shifted away from a discussion of economic transformations to one of political transformations. One of the first case studies in the ‘Third World’ was Indonesia, where about a quarter of the population was involved in communist activities by 1965. In fact, it was so popular that some thought it possible for a communist regime to rise democratically. In the 1960s, Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, implemented a system of “guided democracy.” As Friedman expressed, the Communists had a choice between endorsing Sukarno’s “functional dictatorship” or continuing to pursue a democratic rise of communism. The Soviet Union encouraged people to endorse Sukarno, which ended in a pair of coups and a massacre of communists. From this series of violent events, the Soviets determined that autocratic strategies were not an effective means to establish a socialist regime. 

In 1971, learning from Indonesia, the prominent Soviet politician Leonid Brezhnev expressed that it may be more effective to establish socialist regimes democratically and that Latin America, especially Chile, could be an informative case study. Thus, the Soviets encouraged the Chilean communists to employ democratic tactics. Their efforts, however, were unproductive, failing to prevent a military takeover and the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorial rule. At this point, Soviet-backed authoritarian and democratic methods failed. Friedman marks this as the beginning of an important question for Soviet politicians: “if the autocratic road to socialism failed and the democratic road to socialism failed, what lessons can we take away from this?”

One notable take-away for the Soviets was that remnants of the old regime and members of the military could not be trusted, especially when they aligned with the United States. During the Iranian Revolution, they applied the lessons they learned from Chile, largely backing Ruhollah Khomeini. This regime turned out to be, as Friedman describes it, “very politically durable.”

To conclude his lecture, Friedman summarized the main transformations of socialism leading up to the end of the Cold War. He remarked that there was a “shift from Stalinist industrialization to Leninist political organization;” that there was a newfound emphasis on the “incorporation of markets as tools of socialism” and the “rejection of central planning;” and finally, a novel “adoption of other sources of legitimacy focused on anti-Western narratives based around nationalism, ethnicity, race, [and] religion, as opposed to class.” In so doing, Friedman began the work of constructing a complete, global account of socialism’s history, an endeavor he plans to continue in future work.