| This dissertation examines the relationship between politics and ideology at the confluence of the two great geopolitical frameworks of the second half of the twentieth century: the Cold War and decolonization. In the years between the advent of decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa and the death of Mao Zedong, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) fought an intense battle for leadership of the "world revolution." The background of this battle was a transformed revolutionary landscape. Contrary to the expectations of many, after 1945 the capitalist world, rather than return to the state of pre-war depression, embarked on a prolonged period of economic expansion. As prosperity spread and welfare states grew, the prospect of revolution among the proletariats of the industrialized world receded; revolutionary energies exploded, however, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, regions emerging from colonial or semi-colonial states. Consequently, the battle between the USSR and the PRC became a struggle to find a new revolutionary model, one that could speak to poor, agrarian countries more concerned with questions of race, ethnicity, and nationalism than class identity or social control of the means of production. The Soviets and the Chinese approached this new situation from radically different perspectives. While the former were the heirs to the tradition of class warfare and the Second and Third Internationals, the latter had only recently conducted a revolution concerned more with defeating imperialism, and consolidating and building a nation. In short, the Soviet revolution was a predominantly anti-capitalist revolution, while the Chinese revolution was an anti-imperialist one. This background meant that, initially, the PRC was far more in tune with the priorities of the newly emerging states than the USSR was, and Moscow would only manage to re-assert its revolutionary leadership once it had largely adapted itself to the anti-imperialist agenda. The result would be a global left whose rhetoric and priorities had been radically transformed. Race and ethnicity, rather than class, came to dominate even left-wing political discourse, and building socialism was replaced as the primary strategy for achieving global economic equality by First World-Third World confrontation and international re-distributionism. |
