[News] Our Revolutions Are for the Survival and Development of Human Civilisation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*Our Revolutions Are for the Survival and Development of Human 
Civilisation: The Forty-Third Newsletter (2024)*


/Mereka Yang Terusir Dari Tanahnya/ (Those Chased Away from Their Land), 
1960.
Credit: Amrus Natalsya, a member of the Indonesian revolutionary 
cultural organisation Lekra 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0637bdd5bf&e=d206d0a40d>.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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Next year is the seventieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference 
held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and attended by heads of government 
and state from twenty-nine African and Asian countries. Indonesia’s 
President Sukarno (1901–1970), who had led the freedom movement in 
Indonesia against Dutch colonialism, opened the conference with a speech 
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entitled ‘Let a New Asia and a New Africa be Born!’, in which he 
lamented that, while human technical and scientific progress had 
advanced, the politics of the world remained in a state of disarray. In 
the seventy years since then (roughly the global average life 
expectancy), much has been lost and much gained of what was called the 
Bandung Spirit. Humans have yet to harness the immense power they have 
in their hands.

The Promethean fire wielded against the people of Africa and Asia in 
their anti-colonial struggles and against the people of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki had created fear. ‘The life of man’, Sukarno said, ‘is corroded 
and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, 
fear of ideologies’. This fear, Sukarno warned, is more dangerous than 
weaponry because it drives humans ‘to act foolishly, to act 
thoughtlessly, to act dangerously’. Yet, he continued, ‘we must not be 
guided by these fears, because fear is an acid which etches man’s 
actions into curious patterns. Be guided by hopes and determination, be 
guided by ideals, and yes, be guided by dreams!’.

I Made Djirna (Indonesia), /Totem Totem/, 2021.

The agenda that emerged from the Bandung Conference was clear:

 1. To end colonialism and to democratise the international political
    system, including the United Nations.
 2. To dismantle the neocolonial economic structure, which promoted the
    dependency of the formerly colonised world.
 3. To overhaul the social and cultural systems that promoted wretched
    hierarchies – especially racism – and to build a world society of
    mutual understanding and international solidarity.

>From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the Bandung Spirit defined the 
struggles of the Third World Project and made great gains, such as 
delegitimising colonialism and racism as well as attempting to build the 
New International Economic Order 
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But in the vortex of the debt crisis of the 1980s and with the eventual 
collapse of the USSR, that project died. This collapse can be dated to 
the International Meeting on Cooperation and Development, which was held 
in Cancún, Mexico, in October 1981 to discuss the Brandt Report 
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The meeting failed to produce any substantial commitments and was 
followed, in August 1982, by Mexico’s default on its external debts.

In 2005, fifty years after the Bandung Conference, representatives of 
eighty-nine countries gathered in Indonesia for the Asian-African Summit 
of 2005, where they drafted the Declaration of the New Asian-African 
Strategic Partnership, but the meeting did not gain much visibility, nor 
was it taken seriously by the ‘international community 
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Indonesia had recently emerged out of a ghastly coup regime that ran the 
country from 1965 to 1998, and then from 1998 it floundered on the rocks 
of neoliberal policies, including a deepened relationship with the 
United States. The Indonesian government that hosted the 2005 conference 
included the forces that had participated in the bloody coup of 1965 
against Sukarno. It was not a propitious way to commemorate the original 
conference, nor to imagine a new agenda for the Global South. Two years 
prior, the United States had entered a major, illegal war against Iraq, 
having already invaded Afghanistan, and it appeared at that time that US 
unipolarity would remain unchallenged indefinitely. Indonesia and the 
other powers of the Global South were not prepared to challenge the 
United States. That is why the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership 
announced at the 2005 summit was merely a hollow echo 
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of the principles of the original Bandung Project, without much 
emendation, and therefore without any enthusiasm.

Much has changed since both 1955 and 2005. In order to understand the 
character of these changes, we turn to one of China’s most important 
left intellectuals, Wang Hui, who is himself a product of the Chinese 
Revolution 
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of 1949 and the Bandung Spirit. In our latest dossier, , Wang Hui 
reflects on the importance of reading the history of China and the 
Global South from their own dynamics, and not in relation to the West as 
the default point of reference. One hundred and seven years after the 
October Revolution in the Tsarist empire, seventy-five years after the 
Chinese Revolution, and nearly seventy years after Bandung, as China and 
other large states of the Global South position themselves as major 
powers in the world, Wang Hui’s analysis helps us dive beneath the 
surface level of events and produce an in-depth theoretical explanation 
for the rise of China and the Global South.

Three points from Wang Hui’s theoretically rich text are of particular 
interest to this discussion of a world that seeks a new Bandung:

 1. *Revolutions in the periphery*. Wang Hui writes that the modern
    world emerged from two different class-oriented cycles of
    revolutions. The first, the bourgeois liberal revolutionary cycle,
    began in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, and the
    second, the proletarian, anti-colonial, socialist revolutionary
    cycle, was sparked by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The second
    cycle, which drew inspiration more from the In these ‘realms of
    hunger’, the revolutions formed part of a long process of defeating
    feudal inheritances, building productive forces, and trying as
    rapidly as possible to birth a socialist society. Meanwhile, no
    revolutions took place in the realms of full bellies.
 2. *N**ew concepts for the periphery*. Wang Hui looks carefully at the
    way words are used to describe the Chinese revolutionary process and
    finds that some that are ‘borrowed’ from the experiences of other
    countries (Europe’s political history, Marxism, the October
    Revolution, etc.) are nevertheless developed based on the historical
    unfolding of China’s own revolution. This is exactly what occurred
    in other revolutionary experiences, whether in Cuba or in Vietnam.
    Even those concepts that were borrowed, he points out, are not
    transplanted without being transformed; they go through, as Wang Hui
    notes, an act of ‘political displacement’. The Chinese revolutionary
    process borrowed terms such as ‘people’s war’ and ‘Soviet’, but the
    actual history of the Chinese people’s war and of the Jiangxi Soviet
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    (1931–1934) is no mirror image of the events which those terms
    originally described. It is in these experiences, rooted in a
    different cultural world and sometimes in a different time, that the
    concepts can be enriched and metamorphosed.
 3. *The post-metropolitan era*. Wang Hui argues that we are not merely
    in a post-colonial period, but a post-metropolitan era. This
    post-metropolitan condition refers to the fact that the former
    ‘peasant nations’ are now slowly becoming the focal point of world
    development, growth, and culture. It is China and the Global South,
    Wang Hui notes, that are ‘the epochal forces that propelled’ this
    transition. Yet, the transition is incomplete. The West’s control
    over finance, resources, science, and technology has weakened, but
    its control over information and military power has not. That
    military force, a ghostly presence, threatens the world with great
    destruction
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    to maintain the influence and power of the metropolitan or core
    countries.

Dia al-Azzawi (Iraq), /Sabra and Shatila Massacre/, 1982–83.

The journey to a new Bandung has already begun, but it will take time to 
germinate. Eventually, when we have properly understood the 
post-metropolitan world, we will be able to develop a new development 
theory and a new approach to international relations. The gun will not 
be the first instrument picked up to settle disputes.

In 2016, Hawa Gamodi, a Libyan poet and editor of a children’s magazine, 
wrote about what poetry can do in the place of carnage:

    The world has become a graveyard
    But the sun rises
    The breeze caresses a girl’s cheek
    The sea does not forsake its blue
    The swallows tell me of my childhood
    Hidden beneath their wings
    And somewhere a boy foretastes a kiss from his lover’s lips

These are beautiful images of the other side of devastation, pictures 
painted in words by a poet who has seen the bombs fall and guns fire at 
ghosts but kill children. ‘I am writing you’, she continues, ‘my 
resistance to the ruin / I paint a glorious world / Illuminated by a 
poem / That they await’.

In some ways, that is the best way to describe these newsletters (of 
which we have published 348 since 1 March 2018): /resistance to the ruin/.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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