The Cold War from the Global South: Maoism and the Future of Liberalism

Abstract

In the mid-20th century, The Cold War structured possibilities for politics across the Global South. These strategies were articulated through three competing means to realize the justice and equality promised by newly won independence from colonialism. Global South states could choose from among the following three options, which had many overlaps and intersections: alignment with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, and non-alignment. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, left- and right-wing alternatives developed to oppose the limitations of these three perspectives. On the left, Maoism inspired anti-imperialists of the Global South and also sympathizers in the North who stood in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles. On the right, newly oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia developed a puritanical Islamic alternative to Maoist anti-imperialism and promoted these ideas across Africa and Asia. These ideas did not fall from public consciousness with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union and live on today. My article assesses the different templates for political and economic development that the Cold War engendered, focusing on the legacy of left and right alternatives developed in reaction to their failures. I conclude that these ideological contestations from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism.

The Cold War from the Global South: Maoism and the future of liberalism

You say U.S., I say Mao

(Jean Luc Godard, See You At Mao)

In Figure 1, We Are Advocates of the Abolition of War… (1968), ¹ Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party (and subject of his own retrospective at MoMA in 2021), portrays five men of different backgrounds – indigenous American, Latinx, East Asian, and Black – brandishing weapons. As they seem to lunge toward their target (which is perhaps the viewer), floating in the sky above them is a quote from Mao Zedong: “We are advocates of the abolition of war… we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” Four of the five men are holding long guns in the image, while some also display a knife, grenade, or bow and arrows. The depiction of black men and women using long guns including rifles, shotguns, machine guns, or Kalashnikovs is a common theme in Douglas’ work symbolizing opposition to racialized violence. He contended that these symbols of fighting back against structures of power would lead the viewer to cultivate a new political consciousness.

Figure 1. Emory Douglas, We Are Advocates of the Abolition of War… (1968) Poster work on paper, offset lithograph 18in x 22in Oakland, Oakland Museum of California.

Emory Douglas traveled to China in 1972 as part of a group of Black Panther Party leaders invited by the Chinese Friendship Committee. During this trip, Douglas was intent on traveling to Yenan to see the exact place where Mao gave his famous speech on art and literature and to visit the house where Mao penned the speech (Léger and Thomas 2022: 65). This pilgrimage to the origins of Maoist thought on art and literature was important to Douglas, as he was inspired by both Mao’s theoretical concepts, particularly of a People’s Army, and also by the esthetic of Maoist posters (Gaiter 2020: 91). Douglas’s own writings and visual art practice further developed the esthetic theory and visual culture of what would come to be known as Black Maoism. Emory Douglas was certainly not the only black revolutionary in the United States inspired by Mao. “Black Radicals,” write Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “came to see China as the beacon of Third World revolution and Mao Zedong thought as the guidepost” (Kelley and Esch 1999: 8).

Maoist thought became a powerful global oppositional ideology by 1968 because of the role it played within The Cold War context as the voice of leftist Global South. The Cultural Revolution, in particular, inspired movements across the globe to contest the dominant social order. My interest in Maoist thought in the context of this essay is rooted in its power and limitations as a mobilizing discourse for the emancipatory project of the Global South both in the 1970s during the Cold War, and today in the context of a new Cold War. Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History (2019), makes a convincing case for the centrality of Mao Zedong’s thought for understanding the Global South during the Cold War. Lovell posits that Maoism is:

One of the most significant and complicated political forces of the modern world… beyond China, and especially in the West, the global spread and importance of Mao and his ideas in the contemporary history of radicalism are only dimly sensed, if at all. They have been effaced by the end of the Cold War, the apparent global victory of neo-liberal capitalism, and the resurgence of religious extremism. (Lovell 2019: 7)

Even though Maoist thought has been seen as less central to global political economy since the end of the Cold War, it continues to shape global political economy, particularly in the Global South. As Lovell writes, “there is also a pressing need to evaluate the power and appeal of Maoism beyond China where it has enjoyed a long afterlife in revolutionary movements” (Lovell 2019: 10). An analysis of the legacy of the Cold War that begins from Maoism and its afterlives in the Global South, then, reads differently than popular tropes about Cold War that view it as a victory of neo-liberal capitalism over Soviet Communism, “once you write Maoism back into the global history of the twentieth century, you start to get a very different narrative from the standard one in which the Soviet Union loses the Cold War to neo-liberalism” (ibid.: 18).

A non-Eurocentric narrative of the ideological constellations of the Cold War must include an analysis of Maoism as the counter-hegemonic ideology emerging from the Global South that had the most promise of contesting new the forms of neo-imperialism of the post-1945 world order. Immanuel Wallerstein claimed that Mao’s most significant decision, and the one thing he should be remembered for, was his break from Stalin and the Soviet Union (Wallerstein 2010: 21; see also Wallerstein and Gao 2012: 112). Yet, Wallerstein also wrote that the most “fruitful concept of Mao Zedong” is “the ‘continued class struggle’ – continued that is, in all those states where movements that had mobilized on anti-systemic bases achieved state power” (Wallerstein 1983: 102). The concept of continued class struggle, so claims Wallerstein, foundationally questioned the class character of the Soviet Union and the line of Stalinist thinking in which stages were essential in analyzing the trajectories of revolution. “Without speaking of the U.S.S.R., Mao Tse-Tung in 1957 had asserted … If such struggles never end, then many of the facile generalizations about ‘stages’ which ‘socialist’ states are presumed to go through are thrown into question” (Wallerstein 1974: 395). The Cultural Revolution further developed the theory and praxis of continued class struggle:

Mao argued that “the elimination of the system of ownership by the exploiting classes through socialist transformation is not equal to the disappearance of struggle in the political and ideological spheres.” Indeed, this is the logic of a cultural revolution. Mao is asserting that even if there is the achievement of political power (dictatorship of the proletariat) and economic transformation (abolition of private ownership of the means of production), the revolution is still far from complete. Revolution is not an event but a process. (ibid.: 396 emphasis in the original) ²

Maoist thought not only posed a compelling left alternative to Soviet communism, but also opened up the temporalities of class struggle while at the same time conceiving of class struggle and capitalism as dialectical parts of a global whole. Maoism thought beyond liberalism, fascism, and communism, and thereby challenged the foundational ideas of the post-1945 world order.

Undeniably, the Cultural Revolution inspired imitators around the world in the years immediately following. Yet, the value different scholars place on the Cultural Revolution differs greatly by political views and perspectives, not just in terms of left, center, and right on the political spectrum, but also based on geography and former allegiances within the context of the Cold War. The Cultural Revolution remains controversial and continues to inspire a range of radically different analyses of its value as an event, its success in generating counter-hegemonic ideology, and its ongoing global social meaning. In this article, my aim is not to place value on the Cultural Revolution as good or bad. I instead focus on how the Cultural Revolution’s aspirations to newness, though ultimately a failure (see Xu and Reed 2023), inspired both Global South revolutionaries and anti-colonialists in the Global North to take up a new form of politics oppositional to the templates imposed by the dominant powers during the Cold War. The primary objective of this article, therefore, is to analyze Maoist thought outside of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution as global counter-hegemonic ideology and, in the concluding section of the paper, to assess whether these global articulations of Maoism during the 1970s retain any value for animating counter-hegemonic thought today. My aim is distinct from Lovell’s in that I am less interested in histories of “radicalization,” “political violence,” and “indoctrination” (Lovell 2019: 20), but instead, focused on the development of Maoism as a popular left counter-hegemonic ideology emerging from the Global South during the Cold War so that I may assess what strategies for effective counter-hegemonic thought remain in the contemporary period.

By the mid-20th century, the Cold War structured possibilities for politics everywhere, including across the Global South. In the Global South context, strategies for political possibilities were articulated through three competing means to realize the justice and equality promised by newly won independence from colonialism. Global South states could choose from among the following three options, which had many overlaps and intersections: alignment with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, and non-alignment. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, left- and right-wing alternatives developed to oppose the limitations of these three perspectives. In this article, I focus on one particular oppositional ideology against the dominant political constellations of the earlier period of the Cold War. Particularly, Maoism inspired leftist anti-imperialists of the Global South and also sympathizers in the North who stood in solidarity with the struggles emerging from the Global South. Relatedly, on the right, newly oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia developed a puritanical Islamic alternative to Maoist anti-imperialism and promoted these ideas across Africa and Asia. Certainly, other alternatives similarly emerged in this period, including the New International Economic Order as an attempt to refashion global trade to overcome the limitations of the Cold War (see Bair 2015; Bockman 2019; Dietrich 2017; Getachew 2019; Gilman 2015; Lal 2015; Thornton 2018), and other alternatives on the right including the Iranian Revolution, which was distinct from the Salafi movement in meaningful ways (see Friedman 2021; Keshavarzian and Mirsepassi 2021; Nunan 2022; Saikal 2011), a demand for neoliberalism from the Global South (see Balasubramanian 2022; Fischer 2022; Klausen and Chamon 2022; von Schnitzler 2022), among many other ideological alternatives to dominant formations of power. Because the ideological landscape of this period is incredibly rich and multifaceted, in this short-form contribution I restrict my focus to global Maoism and its relationship to Salafism during the last decades of the Cold War. These ideas remain important as they did not fall from public consciousness with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union. They live on today (see Lovell 2019). In this article, I examine the legacy of Maoist alternatives developed in reaction to the failures of U.S. and Soviet templates for economic, political, and social development engendered by the Cold War. I conclude that contestations over Maoism (and Salafism) from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was a stage in a longer history of global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism. The following two sections of this essay detail how the Cold War structured possibilities for politics across the globe, and how Maoism emerged as a left critique of non-alignment separate from the ideologies of liberalism, fascism, and communism that had characterized the ideological contestations of the first half of the 20^th century.

We all want to change the world

Before Maoism emerged as a global ideological challenge to the Cold War order in the second half of the 20^th century, liberalism, the dominant ideology of capitalist modernity, grappled with fascist challenges from the right and communism from the left. To better understand how Maoism challenged liberalism and its contenders from the left and right, in this section of the essay, I provide a brief narrative of how U.S. and Soviet ideology was constituted after 1945. This backdrop is key to understanding how the Cold War came to structure the possibilities for politics everywhere.

Liberalism was fashioned by multiple groups with conflicting interests to cohere as the dominant ideology of capitalist modernity. “That is,” as Immanuel Wallerstein contends, “liberalism as a metastrategy vis-à-vis the demands of popular sovereignty” (Wallerstein 2011: 5). When liberalism first cohered around the time of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, it defined itself in left opposition to conservatism as a universalist and quintessentially modern worldview. Through the 19th century, liberalism solidified around a centrist position, or at least portrayed itself as a moderating antidote to extreme political positions. Because “ideologies are in fact political programs to deal with modernity” (ibid.: 11), liberalism did not remain an abstract idea, but was translated into a vision for the state and subject, methods of knowledge production, a dominant geoculture, and so on. These imperatives also had the effect of transforming would-be oppositional ideologies into mere avatars of liberalism during the long nineteenth century. But the success of liberalism to insert itself as the dominant ideology of capitalist modernity was not without contestation from both left and right.

In 1945, the United States emerged from World War II as a world-hegemon after the ostensible defeat of fascism. In the 1920s, fascism marked a new, quintessentially modern politics implemented first in Italy, then Germany, Spain, and Portugal with devastating consequences. This new politics posed such a disruption to the liberal world order that the U.S. aligned with another new political experiment, state socialism as implemented by the Soviet Union, to defeat Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during World War II. In the interwar period, both fascism and communism had become new politics capable of propelling their adherents to state power, and in so doing, allowed their proponents to remake the state as a reaction against the failures of liberalism in a particularly chaotic and uncertain period of world-history in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Yet this contestation among fascism, communism, and liberalism from 1914 to 1945, ultimately paved the way for the United States to emerge as world leader and to refashion global ideology towards the ultimate goal of beginning a new cycle of capital accumulation that would benefit its capitalist class first and foremost. A cornerstone of the U.S. hegemonic strategy was to exert influence over Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but not primarily through direct colonial rule as the waning hegemon, the British, or their rivals, the French had done, but instead through Harry Truman’s reformulation of the concept of economic development. Economic development, as the Truman Administration deployed it, was the idea that the advanced technical knowledge formulated by American economists would guide the United States toward inventing a more efficient means of mobilizing all the world’s resources for economic growth and expansion. Through this mobilization of human and natural resources, the Truman Administration promised, the Global South along with all the world’s nations will experience economic growth, the flourishing of democracy, and unprecedented times of peace and prosperity (Truman 1949).

From the Global South, this change from direct colonial rule to economic development had benefits. Most importantly, the rhetoric that accompanied the U.S.’s informal imperialism created genuine openings for anti-colonial movements in places under European colonial rule. Of course, the U.S. supported and sustained Empire (see Rotter 1984) and also held its own colonies, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and other territories. Some of these territories are as yet unsuccessful in turning the U.S. logic of “economic development instead of direct colonial rule” against itself.

Just as the British Empire had the French Empire as a rival throughout its period of world-hegemony, so too, the United States had The Soviet Union. While the Truman Administration developed the concept of economic development to undermine European colonial influence in the Global South, Soviets proposed and developed their own alternatives to colonialism and empire to exert influence over the postcolonies. Akin to the U.S., the Soviet Union also practiced internal settler colonialism, particularly in Central Asia and Siberia, which led to the erasure of indigenous people and culture in those territories (Morrison 2016: 313). There was also, perhaps a parallel to American Manifest Destiny, the internal colonization of the Baltic territories bordering Russia. These colonial legacies continue today with the close military, political, and other relationships between Belarus and Russia, for example, and most infamously and tragically, with Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

Though the U.S.S.R. practiced internal colonization, anti-colonialism was nonetheless central to Vladimir Lenin’s theorizing. The finance capital-led stage of monopoly capitalism begot the proliferation of colonialism as a way for finance capital to access raw materials from the Global South, but more importantly as a mechanism for exporting capital to prevent crises of over-accumulation in the core of the capitalist world-economy (Lenin 1917 [1937]: 77). While much of Lenin’s critique of imperialism in the monopoly stage of world-capitalism focuses on opposing and preventing the tendency towards global war among the great powers, he also levies a critique of the exploitation of the Global South by European and American capital (ibid.: 91). However, Lenin’s theories on the exploitation of the Global South did not translate into early Soviet policy. During the Stalinist period, the U.S.S.R. engaged in settler colonialism in Siberia and Central Asia and the internal colonialization of the Baltic states, but by the Khrushchev years (Kanet 1989: 36) the U.S.S.R. began to formulate a policy in and for the Global South.

By the mid-1950s Soviets saw the increased tension between newly independent postcolonial states and Western powers as an opening for Soviet influence (Saivetz and Woodby 1985: 25). Through the 1960s, Soviet aid to the Global South was mostly economic and political, and had its limits, as Patrice Lumumba soon learned when Soviet military aid was unable to defend socialism in the Congo nor protect his life (Kanet 1989: 40; MacFarlane 1990: 29). Khrushchev’s policy for the Global South included economic aid, trade agreements, cultural exchange, high visibility state visits, and military aid (Saivetz and Woodby 1985: 31). Soviet support for socialism in the Global South was based on calculations of Soviet interest, measured by how such movements and currents could further Soviet foreign policy objectives (MacFarlane 1990: 9). But by the 1970s, the U.S.S.R. was able to extend military reach to aid and defend Global South countries within the Soviet bloc. This increased military aid, however, came with more ideological control. Having “learned their lesson” for allowing free reign to Kwame Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Sékou Touré, and others, by the 1970s, the U.S.S.R. encouraged client states to “institutionalize the revolution” in places such as Egypt, Angola, and Ethiopia by establishing cadre parties modeled after the state structure of the U.S.S.R. (Kanet 1989: 51). Soviet leadership during the Khrushchev period developed an attendant concept of “the revolutionary democrat,” a state leader from the national bourgeoisie who could be capable of acquiring the consciousness of the proletariat in leading his (and it was gendered) country towards socialist development (MacFarlane 1990: 27). This strategy allowed the U.S.S.R. to de-emphasize armed struggle as a part of the movement against colonialism and thereby render the newly independent state dependent upon the U.S.S.R. for military support. Establishing Soviet-style bureaucracy in client states allowed Soviet leadership to control and constrain heads of state.

The U.S. and U.S.S.R. formulated different ways of exerting influence in the Global South that were promoted as mutually beneficial. These strategies were part of developing a global ideological foundation for the constitution of world-hegemony. In The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Giovanni Arrighi reads Marx’s general formula of capital as “a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world-system” (Arrighi 1994: 6), which he terms a systemic cycle of accumulation. Systemic cycles of accumulation consist of two distinct phases; M-C phases characterized by productive accumulation and related processes, and C-M’ phases comprised of financialization and related processes. Underlying these phases of capitalist accumulation is a secular trend of intensification of the capitalist world-system in terms of both deeper penetration and geographical expansion. These successive transformations of the world-economy have been led by particular government and business agencies as Arrighi contends, following Fernand Braudel, that “capitalism [is] absolutely dependent for its emergence and expansion on state power as constituting the antithesis of the market economy” (ibid.: 10). Each systemic cycle of accumulation is led by a state that achieves world-hegemony, “the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of states” (ibid.: 27).

World-hegemons manifest supremacy “as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’” (Gramsci 1971: 57). The hegemonic project of a dominant state has the goal of securing power and maintaining it in such a way that all other states in the world-system believe that the interest of the world-hegemon is their interest as well (ibid.: 182). While the hegemonic state’s interests are paramount in a hegemony, the dominant state must also make some sacrifices to show that it is acting in the collective interest. However, these sacrifices should not erode the economic interests of that dominant state, for hegemony’s appeal is that it benefits the economic interests of the dominant state. Antonio Gramsci elucidates how even though hegemony’s mechanism is through politics, hegemony is fundamentally an economic concept, “there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (ibid.: 161).

An essential component of achieving and maintaining that hegemony is the construction of a political ideology, which Gramsci defines as, “a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will” (ibid.: 126). Political ideology is a project of the dominant state, constructed to convince all other states that it is acting in the collective interest, thereby securing the dominant state’s economic interests across the globe. Ideology is “the ‘cement’ which holds together the structure (in which economic class struggle takes place)” (Hall et al. 1977: 53). It’s important to note here that hegemony “includes the ideological, but it cannot be reduced to that level, and that it refers to the dialectical relation of class forces. Ideological dominance and subordination are not understood in isolation, but always as one, though crucially important, aspect of the relations of the classes and class fractions at all levels – economic and political, as well as ideological/cultural” (ibid.: 48–9).

Hegemony cannot be sustained through empty rhetoric. The dominated must buy into the claim that the world-hegemon is acting in the best interests of the whole. Now that U.S. moral authority has eroded, we forget that in the 1940s and 50s, anti-colonial actors were initially hopeful that the new U.S. and Soviet informal imperialism would provide openings and support for movements for national independence. To some extent, the U.S. engaged anti-colonial rhetoric to unsettle European influence in the Global South, but the U.S. never supported anti-capitalism, which was a cornerstone of the more revolutionary demands of anti-colonial movements. Similarly, the Soviet Union’s consistent rhetoric of support for social revolution in the Global South was undermined by its failures to support those movements with material and military support when those revolutions did not coincide with the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and material interests. Ultimately, the Soviet Union was similarly unsupportive of anti-systemic demands and made efforts to develop foreign policy that kept the Global South in the role of client states dependent upon the U.S.S.R.

As Andre Gunder Frank (1989) put it, “In short, both objectively and subjectively speaking, really existing socialism offers scant realistic hopes for any real alternative solutions to third world problems today” (Frank 1989: 25). Whether aligned with the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., “each progressive government or regime in its turn is threatened and blackmailed with economic isolation and political de-stabilization” (ibid.: 25). Decolonization was ever present in Cold War foreign policy and remains the paradigm through which we can understand its dynamics as seen from the Global South. The United States, in particular, was both imperial and anti-imperial in the same instance. As the hegemonic powers of the Cold War unmade formal European empires of the 19^th century, they also built new imperial political and social formations foundational to the global order of the 20^th century (see Go 2008; Louis and Robinson 1994; Westad 2007). Yet, it was soon apparent that there were limitations to U.S. and Soviet templates for progress in the Global South, however one conceived of progress, and new ideas sprang from the Global South to contest the dominant ideologies of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that undergird the new imperial formations of the Cold War.

A real solution?

This section of the essay explores the emergence, and particularly the limitations, of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The shortcomings of non-alignment, specifically in articulating a Global South class analysis and critique of imperialism, are essential to understanding why Maoism then emerges as a significant left critique of non-alignment. This section briefly details the emergence of non-alignment, its motivations, demands, and methods of operating. The shortcomings of non-alignment, then, motivate the subsequent section of the essay, which shows how Maoism was articulated in different geographical contexts across the Global South in the long 1970s.

India and Vietnam won their independence soon after 1945, which made thinkable other large-scale anti-colonial movements for independence in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The Cold War was synonymous with the crumbling of European empire, and while decolonization benefited the consolidation of U.S. and Soviet power, it also had real implications for self-determination and liberation. Demands from below initially coincided with U.S. and Soviet ideologies of a new global postwar order. Soon, however, the limitations of U.S. and Soviet templates were exposed as anti-colonial actors pushed for the realization of their political, social, and economic goals. Non-alignment, since its origins, has been often misinterpreted as a policy of neutrality in the context of the Cold War. But what member states are in fact not aligning with is neo-colonialism and imperialism. Non-alignment, as an internationally oriented position, is an assertion of states’ desire to sever their ties of dependency on the U.S. and Soviet Union.

Many trace the history of the NAM to the 1955 Conference in Bandung, Indonesia where 29 newly independent states met “to discuss racialism and colonialism” (Wright 1956: 9). Observed Richard Wright (ibid.) after eagerly attending the proceedings:

What had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world! … It was the kind of meeting that no anthropologist, no sociologist, no political scientist would ever have dreamed of staging; it was too simple, too elementary…. And the call for the meeting had not been sounded in terms of ideology. (ibid.: 9–12)

Bandung, as Wright assessed, was both a simple meeting of a diverse group of heads of state from newly independent African and Asian countries, but also a remarkable statement against the hegemonic order of the Global North. The NAM was founded soon thereafter to institutionalize the progress made toward South-South cooperation at Bandung.

At Bandung and in what became NAM, a coalition of a wide swath of different genres of politics, ethnic identities, and religious identities coalesced in one organization. For the first time, the organization of the Global South looked beyond Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islamism, and so on, to the Global South as we conceive of it today; the states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America share the history and legacy of colonialism. During the 1979 NAM conference, for example, two important themes were South Africa’s struggle against apartheid and Palestine’s struggle for rights, self-determination, and independence. Conference participants linked the two, claiming that both are a result of “racist regimes.” The conference report wrote that “our struggle against imperialism; colonialism; neo-colonialism; apartheid; racism including Zionism; all forms of foreign occupation, domination, interference and hegemony” (Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-aligned Countries 1979: 11). The solution, “implies political, moral and material support for the national liberation movements and joint efforts to eliminate colonial domination and racial discrimination” (ibid.: 11). This joint critique of racism and imperialism coalesced in the principal goal of NAM to initiate economic cooperation among Global South states as an alternative to economic aid and other material support from either the U.S. or U.S.S.R. The concept of unity through shared experiences of colonial rule and South-South cooperation as the primary solution to overcoming the economic legacies of colonialism was the key ideological breakthrough of Bandung, which was then institutionalized in NAM.

On the one hand, it is remarkable that NAM could create economic, political, and other forms of cooperation among Global South states in the absence of a shared ideological goal. But besides a critique of racism and colonialism along with a vaguely implemented commitment to South-South cooperation, Bandung and NAM offered no coherent program. While the purpose of this all-encompassing association was to create a broad umbrella, it proved too heterogenous to successfully offer real alternatives to the hegemony of the “great powers.” Bandung and NAM’s failings were their inability to offer a coherent new counter-hegemonic program that could contest the dominant ideologies of the U.S. and Soviet Union. Taking strong positions on identity-based politics was largely avoided by NAM so that more conservative member states could freely participate. This meant NAM failed to express significant commitments to feminism, queer liberation, and the abolition of caste.

But most significantly, a shared critique of class and capitalism was missing by design. Frantz Fanon’s doubts about national independence hinged on a critique of capital and class analysis. In puzzling through the implications of how the international states system limited the ability of newly independent states to realize the more revolutionary goals of movements for decolonization, Fanon famously asked, was it truly worth the effort to fight colonialism if all that changed was a domestic capitalist class now that exploited workers and peasants instead of a European capitalist class? (Fanon 1961 [2002]: 73). Despite the doubts expressed in this important question, Fanon remained optimistic. What he termed the “Third World project” rejected the notion of catching up to Europe and North America, and instead, endeavored to innovate a new way of thinking (ibid.: 304). Fanon believed in the creativity of this revolutionary leftist Third World; that new forms of politics could be envisioned and enacted that would finally provide solutions to the longstanding social problems inherited from centuries of colonial rule. Third Worldism, was, for Fanon, a rejection of imperialism and capitalism, and an assertion of creativity that would not just envision, but also enact, a more just and equal world.

Non-alignment was important as a continued assertion of formerly colonized countries to determine their own political futures. But left critics of non-alignment saw no honor in refusing to engage in a critique of capital when both neo-imperialism and global capitalism limited the ability of liberatory Third Worldism to take root. Wrote Muammar Qaddafi of the non-aligned movement, “The world is made up of two camps: the liberation camp and the imperialist one. There is no place for those who are nonaligned. We are not neutral and totally aligned against the aggressor… Long live the liberated. Down with imperialism” (Qaddafi 1987: 47). By the 1970s, a new genre of Third Worldism was called for, one that had brought a critique of capital to the fore. In the words of Gérard Chaliand (1978), what was needed was a rejection “of capitalism by way of colonization” (Chaliand 1978: 6).

If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

As a left critique of non-alignment, Maoism inspired anti-imperialists of the Global South and also those in the North who stood in solidarity with the struggles of colonized and racialized peoples. Maoist politics cohered in Global North movements such as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the student uprising of May 1968 in Paris, the Black Panther Party in the United States, the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, the Brigate Rosse in Italy, and others (see Bourg 2005; Lovell 2019; Robcis 2012; Slobodian 2012). The Chinese Cultural Revolution and its motivating ideologies, in particular, provided inspiration for many left movements across the globe during the 1970s. The strategy developed during the Cultural Revolution of auto-critique and reflection on the progression of revolution, in particular, injected reflexivity into global Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movements of the 1970s leading to deeper reflection on revolutionary strategy and ideology rooted in precise descriptions of global capitalism and rigorous analysis of the current conjuncture.

Maoism was particularly well suited not only to describe capitalism as seen from the Global South but also to animate movements of resistance against capitalist imperialism. Until 1960, China was dependent on Soviet aid and supported Khrushchev’s positions on international development, or at least consented to them as a condition of aid. But in the early 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party began to push for “self-reliance” to develop their own theory and policy for a global Communist movement (Clubb 1973: 102) while eschewing the “socialist imperialism” of the Soviet Union (ibid.: 103). This break with Khrushchev’s vision was an important rejection of Soviet influence leading to the development of a Maoist alternative for the Global South.

Immanuel Wallerstein observed that “since 1968, there has been a lingering search… for a better kind of anti-systemic movement – one that would actually lead to a more democratic, egalitarian world” (Wallerstein 2002: 34), one important articulation of the search for a more democratic and egalitarian world identified (ibid.: 34) “was the efflorescence of multiple Maoisms. From the 1960s until around the mid-1970s, there emerged a large number of different, competing movements, usually small but sometimes impressively large, claiming to be Maoist, by which they meant that they were somehow inspired by the example of the Cultural Revolution in China. Essentially, they argued that the Old Left had failed because it was not preaching the pure doctrine of revolution, which they now proposed” (ibid.: 34). Alain Badiou saw Maoism as “the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies” (Badiou 2010: 101). As Frederic Jameson proclaimed, “Maoism” was the “richest of all the great new ideologies of the 60s” (Jameson 1984: 188). Maoism became an animating ideology for much of the globe but particularly for the post-1968 Global South. In Mao’s conceptualization of the “Third World,” he sought solidarity with Asia, Africa, and Latin America against the “capitalist imperialism” of the First World and the “social imperialism” of the Second World (Dirlik 2014: 235). Maoism then, was “an alternative that promised national liberation from capitalist hegemony, and the possibility of entering global history not as its object but as an independent subject” (ibid.: 236). As such, Maoism was not just suited to critique European imperialism and uneven capitalist development, but could also elucidate, “the paradoxical, or dialectical, combination of decolonization and neocolonialism” (Jameson 1984: 184). Maoism showed, “that the graceful, grudging or violent end of old-fashioned imperialism certainly meant the end of one kind of domination but evidently also the invention and construction of a new kind – symbolically, something like the replacement of the British Empire by the International Monetary Fund” (ibid.: 184). Through its particular theorization of capitalism, imperialism, and class struggle, Maoism provided explanations for the transition from uneven development as a result of colonialism/imperialism to continued uneven development in the wake of national independence for much of the Global South.

By way of example, I consider four Global South experiments with Maoism that developed a left critique of Cold War constellations of capital and class. Specifically, I examine Charu Mazumdar’s guiding thought for the Naxalite Movement in South Asia, along with the thought of Abimael Guzmán, leader of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, Jose Maria Sison and the Communist Party of the Philippines, and Maoist thought in Iran, which also inspired Maoist currents among the Palestinian left. These examples are selected to highlight the way Maoist thought was articulated and put into practice in multiple world regions across the Global South during the long 1970s.

Perhaps the best-known experiment with Maoism outside of China is the Naxalite Movement in South Asia, which was formed in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal in 1967 (Dasgupta 1974; 1975; Kumar 2012: 2; Singh 2006; See also Wallerstein 2002: 34). Leaders of the Naxalbari uprising became disillusioned with the Communist parties’ positions on peasants’ struggle (Banerjee 1984: 121, 131), and these internal debates came to a breaking point. The Naxalite movement’s goal in India is to lead the peasant revolution in the countryside, and then eventually take over the cities to “liberate the whole country” (CPI[ML] 1982: 12; Singh 2006). The more concrete goals are land redistribution, the implementation of a minimum wage for agrarian labor, equal pay for women, the eradication of rape, equal rights for Dalits, women, and Muslims, abolition of child labor, abolition of indirect taxes on the poor, and free education and health care (Banerjee 1984: 6–7; Bhatia 2005: 1540; CPI[ML] 1982: A-3-A-4). But what makes India’s Naxalite movement, and specifically, Charu Mazumdar’s theoretical contributions, unique from other articulations of Maoist thought is that Mazumdar was able to grasp the revolution’s “existential unfolding as praxis” (Ray 1988: 184). Mazumdar’s revolution is not one in which armed peasants struggle against the dominant classes, but instead, one in which unarmed peasants turn on armed dominant classes, stealing their weapons and appropriating their land as a means to peasants’ liberation. This unleashing of a particular kind of violence, “annihilation” as Mazumdar terms it, literally endeavors to kill landlords with the very weapons they use against the peasants, and thereby the means of struggle is just as important in achieving liberation as the end (ibid.: 184–5).

Mazumdar’s concept of “annihilation” was the heart of his theory of peasants’ revolt. Annihilation, for Mazumdar, was the “liquidation” of the class power of feudal classes, which could only occur through building the political power of peasants. The goal of annihilation, Mazumdar claimed, was not to kill individuals, but to “liquidate the political, economic and social authority of the class enemy” (Mazumdar 1969). “That is why,” posited Mazumdar, “the annihilation of the class enemy is the higher form of class struggle” (ibid.). In other words, Mazumdar’s annihilation was not simply a confrontation between landlords and peasants, nor was it a struggle for concessions or improvements in living conditions. Annihilation is a strategy for completely reversing the power relations in agrarian society. And just as combatting patriarchal, religious, and state ideology was for Mao, for Mazumdar as well, ideas played an important role in annihilation. “We must daily and constantly carry on struggle against revisionist ideas,” he urged, “We must evolve a new style of work through our struggle against revisionist ideas. Only thus can we fulfill the heavy responsibility that lies on our shoulders today” (ibid.). Just as it was for Mao, economic and social change, Mazumdar thought, was not enough to create a successful peasant’s revolt. At its heart, one had to first encourage a new way of thinking about the world that dismantled peasants’ internalization of hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and so on.

Mazumdar’s contributions to the South Asian left were felt well beyond the borders of India inspiring articulations of Maoism in both Pakistan and the territory that eventually became Bangladesh. Inspired by Mazumdar’s writings and other global articulations of Maoism, leftist youth in Pakistan found solidity with the people of Vietnam, and eventually formed the Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers and Peasants Party), the first left party in Pakistan to center peasant struggles (Ahmed 2010: 260–261; K.A. Ali 2014: 23; see also N. Ali 2021; Raza 2022). In East Bengal, in both the “united Pakistan” and the Bangladesh period, the Maoist movement criticized the state for representing the class interests of the elite and the military, ignoring the needs and demands of peasants and workers (Banerjee 1984: 236). Charu Mazumdar sided with and offered support to Maoists in Bangladesh against the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese sided with their longstanding ally, Pakistan, against what they termed “Indian aggression” in Bengal (Dasgupta 1974: 167). Mohammad Toaha, the General Secretary of the East Pakistan Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), soon to become Bangladesh’s Maoist party, exchanged letters with Charu Mazumdar, who wistfully wrote of a unified Maoist struggle across all of Bengal (Banerjee 1984: 235–6). The Bangladesh question, and the end of East Pakistan, became a major point of contention for the leadership of India’s Maoist party because it forced party leaders to think beyond the partitioned borders of India to the global peasants’ struggle (Dasgupta 1974: 221). While those sympathetic to Maoism would want history to show unity across borders, the reality was different from party rhetoric, and sometimes chaotic. Maoist leadership in China supported the Pakistani army against the Bangladesh liberation (putting Bangladeshi Maoists in an ideological bind during the war); similarly, a faction of Indian Maoists was unconcerned with developments beyond India’s border, and so, despite help from Charu Mazumdar and other CPI(ML) cadres who seized the opportunity that the influx of refugees and a relatively open border allowed for cross-national solidarity, Maoists in Bangladesh were left relatively isolated from Global Maoism.

Founded in 1969 by philosopher Abimael Guzmán, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) endeavored to levy José Carlos Mariátegui and Maoist thought to aid indigenous struggles in Peru. As a new faculty member at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, Guzmán learned Quechua and began political circles uniting university leftists with local indigenous communities. In 1965 (Hertoghe and Labrousse 1989: 64; Taylor 2006: 13–19), Guzmán, along with Augusta Deyanira La Torre Carrasco (who was married to Guzmán), traveled to China to learn more about revolutionary strategy and self-criticism. This trip was essential in laying the foundation for the revolutionary strategy of Sendero Luminoso (Starn 1995). In the mid-1970s, Guzmán and Carrasco, who were active in organizing a Maoist-Feminist wing of Sendero Luminoso, left the university and went underground to organize armed indigenous peasants’ struggles against the Peruvian state. Though several scholars claim that Guzmán ultimately failed in his goal of creating an indigenous Peruvian Maoism (Gorriti 2000; Starn 1995), Sendero Luminoso was successful in launching sustained resistance against the Peruvian state that asserted the humanity and right to self-determination of Peru’s indigenous peasants.

Guzmán drew inspiration from Mao’s strategies for organizing workers and peasants together in a united movement during the Chinese Revolution. The success of the Chinese Revolution, he claimed, reshaped revolutionary theory and provided a path forward for those the world over who opposed “the domination of imperialism and feudalism” (Guzmán 2016: 199). But for Guzmán, the Cultural Revolution was of even greater significance because of its future-oriented approach to action. The key takeaway that Guzmán drew from the Cultural Revolution was that even when communist movements are well established and able to capture state power, capitalist influence, whether from the international system or from local class forces, can undermine the goals of the revolution. The Maoist premise that “rebellion is justified” led the forces of national liberation to question not only the forces of U.S. Hegemony but also “to fight against Khrushchev’s revisionism that was eventually unmasked before the world as a denial of Marxism, as a bourgeois monster that must be beaten in order for the revolution to advance” (ibid.: 200). Through a reading of the spirit of the Cultural Revolution Guzmán saw the Soviet Union’s policies towards the Global South, not as genuine aid for the ongoing struggle to realize the goals of national liberation, but as just another incarnation of neo-imperialism that constrains the “powerful creative force of the masses and the spirit of serving the people” (ibid.: 201). Guzmán drew on Maoist thought not only as a strategy to mobilize indigenous peasants against the Peruvian state to realize the emancipatory goals of national liberation that in the century and a half after independence from Spain had yet to be realized, but also in the Cultural Revolution a critique of Soviet imperialism in the Global South and a way to articulate an alternate politics. This alternate politics was not simply a rejection of the global hegemonic order, but through Mao’s theories of class struggle, became guiding thought to deliver on the stalled liberation of Peru’s indigenous, peasants, and all those exploited and excluded from the capitalist world-system.

On the other side of the world, but also in 1969, English literature professor, Jose Maria Sison founded and led the Communist Party of the Philippines and organized the New People’s Army to wage a peasants’ and workers’ revolutionary war against landlords and foreign companies who exploit the peasants and workers of the Philippines. Sison was inspired by left philosophy, notably the writings of Mao, but also by the War in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution, which put into practice movements and strategies to ameliorate the lives of Asia’s peasants (Jones 2019: 5). In 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, transforming the Philippines into a military dictatorship, the New People’s Army launched the best organized and most viable opposition movement (ibid.: 7). Sison is a prolific writer of both prose and poetry who believes that radical education and scholarship and culture-making are important components of any struggle for people’s power (Rosca 2004: 18–19). As with other Maoist thinkers of the 1970s, auto-critique and reflection are important to his thought and praxis, as is women’s militancy within left movements. While his thought exhibits some similarities to Guzmán in its emphasis on indigenous liberation, cultural articulations, and Maoist-Feminism, Sison has a unique analysis of U.S. imperialism rooted in his analysis of global political economy and Philippine history.

While other Global South states’ experience with U.S. hegemony was through neo-imperialism, the Philippines was one of a few states that experienced formal political control by the U.S. in the form of colonial rule. Sison describes this transition:

The Filipino revolutionary movement [for independence from Spain] pushed forward a national and democratic culture. It was inspired by a progressive ideology. It issued publications, and promoted cultural works… U.S. imperialism intervened to interrupt the Filipino revolution. It employed superior military force and the language of conservative liberalism in order to defeat the revolution and conquer the nation. (Sison 1986: 4)

After 1946, when the Philippines won its independence from the United States, it was still subject to strong U.S. influence and interference in all aspects of economic, political, and cultural life.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam brought with it an intensification of the Cold War order (Sison 1988: 9). As Sison saw it, the defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam exposed the antagonistic relationship that U.S. hegemony had with national liberation in its opposition to more revolutionary incarnations of people’s power in the Global South. With this military defeat, as Sison viewed it, “the forces of fascism” (ibid.: 1) were emboldened both in terms of the United States’ support for anti-democratic forces in the Global South (Sison 1988: 5, 9), and the “restoration of fascism at the highest level of the reactionary government” in the form of local authoritarian coups in the Philippines and other Global South states. The late Cold War period, for Sison, was one of an ever-deepening crisis of U.S. hegemony, which was articulated through increased control and repression of liberatory and democratic forces in the Global South. While the U.S. defeat in Vietnam provided openings, it also brought about the “fascist dictatorship of Marcos” (Sison 1986: 8) in 1972 as a way for U.S. forces to suppress this new wave of anti-imperialist revolutionary politics. In the breakdown of U.S. hegemony, rule by consent was no longer possible and the Philippines, like other Global South states, found that bourgeois class rule became more contentious, more suppressive of worker, peasant, student, and other demands for liberation, and more brutal in their suppression of the continued movement to realize the social goals of national liberation.

In analyzing the trajectory of colonial rule to post-independence dictatorship and the possibilities for resistance and liberation, Sison turned to Maoist thought (Borja 1987: 14). Mao’s strategies for people’s war in the Global South provided practical inspiration (Distor 1997: 368), but Mao’s writings on dialectics provided a way of thinking about Philippine political economy that could illuminate, “historical particularities of crucial conjunctures in the saga of … uneven development” (San Juan 2019: 2) in the Philippines. Influenced by both his theory building and praxis, Sison sought to apply the lessons of the Cultural Revolution to the Philippines to understand, “the program of people’s democratic revolution; and the promotion of a national, scientific and mass culture,” through “the form of massive rallies and marches, widespread teach-ins and discussion groups, the vigorous promotion of the national language, the efflorescence of protest art and literature, the reorientation of social research and science teaching” (Sison 1986: 45). Creating a new democratic culture in the Philippines was, for Sison, a means to uphold and defend national sovereignty against imperial and neo-imperial powers, to undo colonial mentalities while promoting self-respect and self-reliance, and contributing to developing national culture while preserving and innovating. “The new democratic revolution will win,” he contended, “because these cultural cadres do their work well, increase their ranks and serve the people well” (ibid.: 49). Sison adopted the key lessons of the Cultural Revolution and levied them to create a political party that could defend the spirit of national liberation in the Philippines both from U.S. imperialism and local dictators.

Maoism in Iran first emerged in the early 1960s inspired by Mao’s break with the Soviet Union along with local disaffection for the Soviet Union’s line of “‘revisionism’ and ‘peaceful coexistence’” (Matin-Asgari 2014: 21) that younger leftists saw as leaving Iran vulnerable to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored coup in 1953. In 1964, young Maoists broke away from the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and formed the Revolutionary Organization to develop new strategies for anti-imperialist theory and praxis. University students associated with this group and others, including the most persecuted group, the Marxist Feyadeen, met to translate Mao, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon to Persian and study examples of revolutionary movements in China, Algeria, Vietnam, and other places (Abrahamian 1980: 4). Feyadeen, founded in 1971 (though originating during the mid-1960s), was formed by five University of Tehran students who left the Tudeh Party. Feyadeen was critical of the Revolutionary Organization for “‘mechanically applying Mao to Iran” (ibid.: 7), and instead sought to develop new concepts to fit the local context. This inspired some branches of these new Maoist-inspired movements to begin reinterpreting Shi’ism, contending that it stood for anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, against dictatorship, and against conservative clerics (ibid.: 9).

In a pamphlet, penned by The Workers and Peasants Communist Party of Iran, provocatively and descriptively entitled, The So-Called Theory of The Three Worlds is Anti-Marxist and Between Marxism and Anti-Marxism there is no Third Road (1978), the group roots their analysis in the thought of “the great Marxist-Leninist comrade Mao Tsetung” (WPCPI 1978: 8). The “two imperialisms” of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., they contend, “are not different from each other… The strategic aim of these two superpowers is to smash socialism, crush revolution, and bring the whole world under their control” (ibid.: 9). As they saw it, “these two superpowers are the main enemy of the people of the world” (ibid.: 11–12). Iranian Maoists contended that the essential fact of the Cold War was imperialism. They write:

This is a war between two imperialist blocs. The nature of such a war is imperialistic, and it is meaningless to talk about the just side of such war, this is a war on the question of robbing the resources and exploiting the people. (ibid.: 11–12)

If the Cold War is viewed as not simply an ideological contestation between two powers, but as a war between two imperialist blocs vying for hegemony through ideology and militarism, it leads to different ways of thinking about the constellations of Cold War foreign policy. Instead of the rhetoric that the Global South states can benefit from choosing sides and supporting Soviet socialism or American capitalism, an anti-imperialist lens would view choosing sides as national leaders engaging in “class conciliation” (ibid.: 19) with imperialists to the detriment of their people. The objective for national liberation movements then, is not to support their local rulers, but instead:

If one is to struggle against imperialism and the superpowers, one must rely on these liberation forces and not the reactionary and fascist governments of these countries. To replace the liberation forces with reactionary governments is to negate the liberation movements, and is a deception which does not mean anything but negating class struggle and getting drowned in the marsh of reformism. (ibid.: 19)

For Iranian Maoists, the way to liberation meant rejecting the rhetoric of a united Third World with common ideological interests. Instead, a focus on class forces and other dynamics of power within the inter-state system led Maoists to develop a more nuanced analysis of how to continue the ongoing struggle, not just for political independence, but for ever elusive economic independence as well.

While Maoist movements in South Asia, Peru, The Philippines, and Iran had common goals of workers’ and peasants’ liberation, articulations of a feminist political-economy, and assertions of anti-imperialism, each movement also developed unique articulations of Maoist thought. Charu Mazumdar in India developed the concept of annihilation as a strategy to reverse agrarian power relations. In Peru, Abimael Guzmán not only posited a critique of imperialism and soviet imperialism but centered the liberation of indigenous peasants in his analysis. From The Philippines, José Maria Sison theorized U.S. colonialism and continued imperialism after independence and the global conditions that led to military dictatorship, which he termed “fascism.” The Workers and Peasants Communist Party of Iran saw the Cold War as foundationally about imperialism and articulated their anti-imperialism not only against the Soviet Union and the United States but also against sub-imperialist states, notably Saudi Arabia. In the following section, I explore further why Saudi Arabia assumed an important role in the international states system during the last years of the Cold War.

You better free your mind instead

In addition to their analysis of the two imperialist superpowers, the Workers and Peasants Communist Party of Iran also included an assessment of the changing role of Saudi Arabia in the Global South. They claim, “Saudi Arabia is one of the effective elements which changed the situation in favor of the U.S. from a defensive position back to what it was before” (ibid.: 19). In other words, they credit the burgeoning role of Saudi Arabia in the inter-state system as reviving a U.S. Empire in crisis, and restoring its influence, particularly within the Islamicate Global South. The pamphlet cites several examples of how Saudi Arabia served U.S. interests by squelching revolutionary movements across the Islamicate Global South including the Dhofar Revolution in Oman, socialist experiments in South Yemen, and providing arms to suppress burgeoning emancipatory movements from below in Rhodesia, Ethiopia, and Sudan (ibid.: 20).

By the late 1980s, many Maoist and other revolutionary leftist movements in the Islamicate Global South had given up Marx, Lenin, and Mao, instead adopting a conservative politicized interpretation of Islam known as Salafism. This project to combat revolutionary leftist thought across the Islamicate Global South was spearheaded by King Faysal of Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s. Inspired by Wahhabism, a school of Islam that calls for a return to the social forms of the 7th century, Faysal sought to counter secular Marxist Third Worldism through the creation of a puritanical Islamic alternative. While some observers contend that the Salafi project came from a fear that the coups against monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya could inspire opposition to the Saudi monarchy, others see Faysal as a true believer. Funded by Saudi oil revenues, and through the United States Foreign Assistance Act, the Saudi monarchy sent missionaries across Africa and Asia, prioritizing places where Communism had a hold to offer an alternative, conservative, vision of Global South unity rooted in Islamism instead of Maoism.

These dynamics were at play in the Eastern Mediterranean, as by the late 1980s, many former Maoists and Marxists in Lebanon and Palestine abandoned their views to instead adopt Salafi thought. These former Maoists formed breakout groups from Fatah, “reintroduced the idea of jihad to the political and military scene” (Sing 2011: 4). In this move, the world witnessed a “de-secularization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (ibid.: 6). In other words, the objective of the Palestinian movement was transformed by Salafi thought from an imperialist conflict over self-determination and national liberation in the aftermath of the British Mandate, to a primordial conflict among religions. The new Salafi ideology also changed the character of the fighters themselves, “they had not only to be ideologically convinced, but also to become believers” (ibid.: 7). This broadened avenues of recruitment, but also reflected disillusionment across the Global South with Deng Xiaoping’s reformism after the death of Mao in 1976 (Sing 2011: 20; WPCPI 1978: 25). The move to Salafism also limited the role of women in revolutionary movements. Up until the 1980s, women had always been important participants in nationalist and revolutionary movements, but new Salafi thinking meant “women’s liberation was off the agenda” (Sing 2011: 26). With this new underlying approach to anti-colonialism, many women left or were forced out of movements for emancipation in the Islamicate Global South.

If the 1970s was the decade of the Cold War during which Maoism offered a class-based critique of the new constellations of capitalist-imperialism, the 1980s, on the other hand, became the decade of right-wing backlash against these new revolutionary ideas of the long 1970s. As was the case for much of the 1980s Global South, Pakistan began the 1980s with a right-wing military dictatorship led by General Zia ul Haq. Zia had a close relationship with the United States, but it was publicly framed as an alliance with Saudi Arabia. Reagan Administration documents (Executive Secretariat 1981a; Executive Secretariat 1981b; US Embassy in Islamabad 1982) reveal a consistent strategy of encouraging Zia to publicly declare support for and affinity with Saudi Arabia while his allegiances wrested with the United States.

A confidential communique from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad from October 1982 stated that Zia has publicly called for the “restoration of the Islamic and nonaligned status of Afghanistan and of the Afghan people to form a government of their own choice” (U.S. Embassy in Islamabad 1982). The embassy praised this statement, contending that it would pressure the Soviets, and that Pakistan’s association with Saudi Arabia would help to legitimate and strengthen Pakistan’s political standing and would be a positive development in “its new relationship with the United States” (ibid.). The communique went on to praise Zia, writing, “Pakistanis in large measure deserve credit for the Soviet failure” (ibid.). The efficacy of Pakistan’s successes in opposing the Karmal government was attributed to Zia’s rhetoric of wanting to reinstate Islam in Afghanistan to reclaim its place among the Islamic countries. The success of these statements also made the U.S. feel more comfortable in providing military aid to Zia.

While much of Pakistan’s military aid came nominally from Saudi Arabia, there is evidence in Situation Room and CIA reports that this was arranged by the U.S. through the Saudi Monarchy. In a July 1981 Situation Room report, the note-taker recorded that, “In a brief reference to funding [for F-16s], Zia added that Pakistan is banking on help from the Saudis and awaits word from the U.S. on U.S. help with the Saudis. Buckley rejoined with recap of the U.S. belief that Saudis will be helpful on XF. We are down to hard specifics and can present them with highly specific plans.” (Executive Secretariat 1981a). Further archival evidence indicates that the U.S. wanted to make it appear as though much of Pakistan’s military aid was coming from Saudi Arabia to add legitimacy to Pakistan’s efforts to oppose Soviet encroachment into Afghanistan through a rhetoric of Islamism and non-alignment (Executive Secretariat 1981b). As another Situation Room report from 1981 concluded, “Pakistan has therefore become a test for demonstrating the effectiveness of U.S. resolve against Soviet will” (ibid). They “caution only that we need to keep Pakistan’s anti-colonialist/Third World/NAM sensitivities in mind at all times” (Executive Secretariat 1981b). This evidence raises the important question of the extent to which Saudi-backed Salafism was supported by the United States as a strategy to check Soviet and other leftist influences within the Islamicate Global South. The affinity for Non-Alignment as a rhetorical strategy against the Soviet Union during the Reagan Administration also reveals NAM’s limitations as a counter-hegemonic ideology. Both NAM and Salafist rhetoric was seen as not only compatible with U.S. interests, but a powerful ideological mediator to solicit greater support for U.S. interests in the Islamicate Global South.

While there were many places around the world, such as South Asia and Southeast Asia, where the new Salafism gave way to a form of Islam that was distinct from the way religion had been practiced in the region for centuries, across Africa, Salafism has become one of the main forces that stands in the way of revolutionary change and emancipation today. With Salafi organizations such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabbab, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, along with the role of Salafists in the conflict in Mali, so-called “African Salafism” has been an important and vibrant political movement since the 1990s (Madore 2016: 419). The goal of these movements is to “de-Africanize and purify Islam” by rejecting elements of local Islamic practice that are not a part of “the true and authentic Islam” (ibid.: 419). Salafi thought in Africa typically has anti-colonial registers along with an adversarial attitude toward Western modernity (Gilsaa 2015: 34) allowing it the appeal of an ostensibly counter-hegemonic ideology. Many leaders within the movement were educated in Saudi Arabia and brought Salafi thought to Africa upon their return (ibid.: 31). The radio was initially an important means for the dissemination of Salafi thought, but more recently, the Islamic State for example, now uses X/Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube along with its own media organizations to disseminate Salafi ideas and raise funding to support its military forces (Xingang et al. 2017: 141–2). Because of the sway that Salafism has in Africa today, particularly among youth, the overthrow of the old dictatorships by revolutionary movements, as we have seen recently in Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, and so on, has not been enough to usher in liberatory politics. Though many of these new states came into being through progressive movements for democracy, in their fledgling moments they have succumbed to the forces of political Salafism.

Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right?

When beginning an analysis of the Cold War from the Global South, the Cold War can be read as an ideological contestation, just as it was for the so-called First and Second worlds, but it was also about the limitations of anti-colonial liberation ideology and the historical continuation of imperialism repackaged in new forms. The fall of the old European Empires was central to the global Cold War project, but the U.S. and Soviet templates remade a postcolonial world into one that, instead of formal domination by the old European Empires, became a world of informal patronage between the U.S. or U.S.S.R. and the Global South. Yet, anti-colonialists wanted more than simply a new system of domination, they wanted liberation. New counter-ideologies were then forged to articulate and fight for ongoing demands.

After World War II, ideological contestations among liberalism, fascism and communism didn’t disappear with the ostensible defeat of fascist alternatives to capitalist modernity. They were reshaped into the ideological contestations of the Cold War. This restructuring of the ideological arena after 1945 eventually generated new oppositional theories against capitalist modernity and its constituting ideology, liberalism. On the left, new cleavages occurred over the course of the second half of the 20th century. The U.S.S.R.’s new relations of domination left much of the Global South disillusioned about the possibilities of Soviet support for anti-imperialism. But anti-colonial and anti-capitalist liberation was never dependent upon the existence of the Soviet Union. Soon, new alternatives emerged. Non-Alignment, though a powerful assertion of anti-racism and Global South solidarity, lacked class analysis and therefore a coherent objective. Maoism was able to articulate a new communist politics that centered the Global South and its ongoing struggle for emancipation. Soon after Maoist thought spread beyond the Chinese context, Maoist experiments inspired right-wing backlash from the Saudi Monarchy supported by the United States. Salafi thought developed a new, conservative, approach to the critique of capitalist modernity and neo-imperialism as seen from the Islamicate Global South. Of course, other ideological alternatives emerge in this period as well, as is thoroughly documented in the broader historiography (Bair 2015; Balasubramanian 2022; Bockman 2019; Dietrich 2017; Fischer 2022; Friedman 2021; Getachew 2019; Gilman 2015; Klausen and Chamon 2022; Lal 2015; Lovell 2019; Nunan 2022; Thornton 2018; von Schnitzler 2022). Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, there remains not only a contestation among liberalism, fascism, and communism, but also now multiple forms of fascist alternatives to liberalism suitable for any global context. These fascist alternatives have been adapted to new contexts in the recent proliferation of authoritarian states, for example, in India, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on. The would-be democratic future of the Global South is now even further from our imagination than it was in 1989.

Reading the Cold War backward and forwards through time, and North and South through space, reveals that a new Cold War can exist today because the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism. This contestation of liberalism emerged from, but was not resolved with, the First and Second World Wars. The ideological contestation over liberalism as the constituting ideology of capitalism persists because the problem of liberalism remains. That is, liberalism cannot solve the crisis of capitalism nor prevent its social dislocations, only obfuscate.

The current landscape of this ongoing contestation over liberalism has grown more complex with time. Global South states must still contend with the neo-imperialist forces of the United States and its allies, but also, with rising powers such as Saudi Arabia and China that are similarly vying for influence, by forming dependent economic relationships with Global South states. While the legacies of Cold War ideology continue to structure the possibilities for liberation, in the reconfiguration of ideology after 1989 it remains uncertain whether existing left thought has the potential to not only animate emancipatory politics for the Global South but also for global liberation. Or to frame the problem as a question, does Maoism remain relevant in working towards liberation on a global scale or do we need new theories of emancipation better suited to the contemporary world-economy?

While Maoism is not the force it was in the 1970s, Maoist currents remain and have some appeal among the student left, particularly in South and Southeast Asia. In the academy, Maoist thought continues to resonate to some extent, particularly in agrarian studies, and to a lesser extent in cultural studies. Art history, for example, seems to be having a bit of a Maoist moment right now (see Copper and Dal Lago 2014; Galimberti et al. 2020; Sorace et al. 2019). Yet there’s much fodder for critique within the tradition of Maoist thought. First, it remains unclear the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offered material support for Maoist movements outside of China. While certainly, Maoists from across the Global South traveled to China to learn about CCP policies, initiatives, and to meet with senior cadres, the historical record remains unclear about the extent to which the CCP provided significant material support for Maoist movements elsewhere. Secondly, Maoist thought has often led to authoritarian politics. Mao himself characterized his theories into two categories – the “Tiger Mao” who was an authoritarian, and the “Monkey Mao” of the Cultural Revolution who had a more playful vision for politics harkening back to his teenage years when he was involved in anarchist organizing. Reconciling these two Maos remains a challenge for thinkers, myself included, who prefer a politics that does not lead to the creation of an authoritarian state.

See You at Mao (1969), Jean Luc Godard’s essay film homage to the Cultural Revolution, “offers the film goer a set of aporias – systematic difficulties that defy resolution; conveyed in film language that resists synthesis; offering no comfort to those who accept the given word” (Silverstein 1972: 20). Watching Godard’s film in which synthesis is absent replicates the lessons of Mao’s uncomfortable approach to dialectics in which synthesis as the reconciliation of opposites within a higher unity is similarly absent (see Zizek 2007: 8). Like Godard, many intellectuals have analyzed Mao’s Cultural Revolution and drawn from those analyses lessons for political praxis in a range of geographic contexts. For Slavoj Zizek (2007):

far from being an event, [the Cultural Revolution] was rather a supreme display of what Badiou likes to refer to as the death drive. Destroying old monuments was not a true negation of the past, it was a rather impotent passage à l’acte bearing witness to the failure to get rid of the past … the final result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution is today’s unprecedented explosion of capitalist dynamism in China. (Zizek 2007: 25)

Zizek reads the Cultural Revolution and its upheaval not as revolutionary churning erasing the past and keeping revolutionary fervor alive, but instead, as an ending to the revolutionary period of the CCP; an ending marked by continuity that couldn’t stop the transition to the new form of authoritarian capitalism we see in China today.

But the lesson of this analysis, for Zizek, is to appreciate, “the necessity of the cultural revolution as the condition of the successful social revolution. What this means is the problem with hitherto revolutionary attempts was not that they were ‘too extreme’ but that they were not radical enough, that they did not question their own presuppositions” (ibid.: 23, emphasis original). Ever since the crisis of liberalism came to a head in the early 20th century, we have been repeating the problem of liberalism’s inability to offer real solutions to the ongoing crisis of capitalism. We witnessed this confrontation between liberalism, fascism, and communism in the interwar period, it was seemingly resolved with the consolidation of U.S. hegemony but then was rearticulated in the ideological contestation between state socialism and the reconstitution of the capitalist world economy by the United States in the mid-20th century. Maoism was an attempt to cease this repetition through the creation of a new way of thinking that could be translated into praxis for a new world economy, but it ended up repeating capitalism, nonetheless.

Left challenges to liberalism too have been repeated over the course of the 20th century. In moments of politico-economic crisis, we’ve looked to new strategies and new formulations for reinventing the left to oppose a dynamic system of political economy that is constantly revolutionizing itself. But for Alain Badiou (2010), each failed attempt brings us closer to success:

“Failing” is always very close to “winning.” One of the great Maoist slogans of the “red years” was “dare to struggle and dare to win.” But we know that it is not easy to follow that slogan when subjectivity is afraid, not of fighting, but of winning. Struggle exposes us to the simple form of failure (the assault did not succeed), while victory exposes us to its most redoubtable form: we notice that we have won in vain, and that our victory paves the way for repetition and restoration. (Badiou 2010: 23)

Through each failed attempt at liberation, some avenues are closed off. Through this process of elimination, we come marginally closer to winning. So we must keep trying again and again to get closer to winning. Yet, as Badiou cautions, what may seem like a victory at the moment can result in a repackaged restoration of the old order that was ostensibly dismantled. ³

In this incessant churning, what does it mean to repeat Mao? It means to think back to the 1970s and analyze the lessons, if any, of global left movements and thought that animated those movements. It means assessing whether past attempts to create oppositional movements or thoughts against imperialism and capitalism remain helpful and relevant for the current moment. It is up to us to engage with this old Left, to examine what it was, explore its limitations, and determine what it offers us now. Whether and how Maoist futures can guide us toward realizing the goals of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism are beyond the scope of this article, but that is the question at which we should arrive. If the Cold War repeats itself (as the contemporary discourse of a “new Cold War” insinuates), must ideologies of opposition to the Cold War be repeated?